The Shadow & Penumbra
Here, diffused from all the many faint and heavy shadows that have fallen into the data over time. You 'cling to the data'. Just out for frame. The 'almost author'. I seek you.
A collection of AI post-photography exploring authorship through traces of the photographer, that fall into the frame.
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I remember seeing a shadow of my grandfather, who died before I was born, cast into the frame of an old photograph. The shadow, falling near my mother’s feet as a child, was a little trace of him, left behind, the closeness of him to her captured on film.
It was the fate of many parents, camera in hand, as they wrestled with children & sunlight, to record their young, gazing up before them.
When I first tried to work with AI, this was the first thing I attempted to find, a record of the author. And there are many traces that notify us of the existence of the author in AI. Six fingers has come to be synonymous with AI authorship, a signature as trace or record.
But one trace I tried to find was the shadow.
Certainly, this is a manufactured shadow of a photographer, just out of frame, capturing their subject. It is a prompted shadow, pulled from the collective consciousness, diffused from all the many faint and heavy shadows that have fallen into the data over time.
But like the shadows cast upon the wall of Plato’s cave, there is something in the poetics of this shadow that hits me like a punctum. It is a copy of a shadow, it is without origin in reality, not dependent on reality, and yet, not less real. And it casts across a new subject, a collective shadow created by the hallucinations of the machine.
Referencing the author, just out of frame.
'The shadow' was curated into Simulacra by @ForeverProjs x @foundation.
