Strawberry Dragon Spatial Collage

2023

an installation of transparent stickers on a window in the ArtLAB building at the University of Manitoba.

48 x 77 inches

It is done in a cute aesthetic to broach the disturbing advancement of Artificial Intelligence art generators replacing human artists.

Artist’s Concept

My concept is a visual depiction of how I feel about recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence Art Generators such as Dall-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. Because these technologies have been improving rapidly, as an artist I feel threatened and I am worried about the value of art being stolen by machines. I want to portray this idea using my cute aesthetic from past works, my Spatial Collage will be what at first appears to be a light-hearted cutesy collage of sprinkles, dessert dragons, strawberries, and puffy clouds. This is to symbolize the appeal and popularity of these AI art generators to non-artists, and how alluring the promise of making art at the press of a button is.

The sinister ramifications of AI art generators for artists will be depicted through glitched, warped, and crystallized textures that reference computer glitches and visual errors on monitors. The concept behind this dreamscape is that it is my prediction of a future nightmare for artists.

When deciding my location, I chose the window in the ArtLab 399 hallway outside of the Large Format Printing office because I feel its elements of grimy dirty glass and the metal grid behind the window will add to my dystopian theme. I felt a window made more sense for transparent vinyl stickers. I think my stickers partially covering bars and dirt will add to the sense of there being negative aspects that are being concealed. I want to have looping lines in my illustration that are translucent in the middle of the loop, partially revealing the grime and metal bars behind the stickers. I want to note that I recognize these metal bars are actually intended to be trellises for plants to grow on, and so in the spring and summer, this change in the environment of plant growth on the windows would likely change the perception of the work. However, this installation is planned to only be up during November and December. I think that a building for Fine Arts education is a very suitable and relevant location for my Spatial Collage because of the work’s themes of art and artists.