Two Handfuls of Silver Dust consists of sculptures, paintings, fragrance, and animations I made by iterating ideas in and out of the machine.
The work began with a sculpture I created in my mind. The abstract forms were inspired by meditations on what it means to create, what it means to create life, what it means to be alive, what stewardship of life on this planet means, the slippages between biological and technological systems, and what humanity’s relationship to the future of life on this planet might look like.
I then tried to recreate the images of the sculptures in my mind using specific prompts fed into the AI Dall-E. The most successful prompts were then translated into chapters of a speculative fiction set in a post-climate change future that became a seed for all the works in the exhibition.
Once the narrative was complete, I asked Chat GPT to produce a speculative scent pyramid I then used to create two fragrances. Each formulation is an interpretation of the notes reflecting potential scent profiles of San Francisco in a post-human future in 3023.
At the same time, I began using clay to sculpt physical versions of the sculptures Dall-E depicted in images generated from my prompts. Eventually, I cast the clay forms in bronze and glass after iterating the forms in and out of the screen using a combination of sculpting by hand and digital fabrication processes utilizing 3D modeling/scanning/and printing.
The poignant moments that ChatGPT created in the narrative were fed back into Dall-E as prompts to make abstract paintings of the scenes. The paintings were realized in physical form using a combination of digital printing and hand painting using acrylic paints. It is sometimes difficult to discern the difference in gestures on the resulting canvases.
I used another AI platform called #StableDiffusion to make animations that begin with the paintings in the exhibition as seed images for the first frame. The animation is guided by the chapters in the narrative produced by ChatGPT and depicts a global network of glass and gold columns growing from a network of marble roots below the earth set in a post-climate change future.
I used another AI called Riffusion to create spectrograms to make audio samples of the clicks, chirps, and hums Chat GPT Described in the story. I mixed the samples together to create the sound sculpture, Every Nowhere.
