‘AI Pot’ 2024

This clay is made out of the scraps, failures and leftovers of four different clays collected from different parts of the globe. It’s then pressed through a huge machine and recycled into ‘pig mill’. 

It’s mix has strange and unpredictable properties; due to its changing chemistry, the outcome of a final firing is never the same. Bright glazes react to dark black and oxides fade into obscurity. It feels apt that the material used to explore current notions of flux within our new relationship with the exponential growth of computer technology should be so unpredictable.

There’s a certain excitement in AI and quantum computing lessening the time it takes to develop advances in science by decades but also bringing up conversations that as the new computer language evolves so quickly it becomes too difficult to learn and understand and therefore too difficult to communicate with the computers new language.

I’m interested in these evolved learning systems and their language. Currently they seem to create unexpected and naive imagery/design that can help humans explore their new identity alongside machine thinking. It seems even more interesting to create a new set of rules in an algorithm to see how they develop over time and become their own creative being.

The more sinister side to visual AI being that it can divert and distort reality so much that a court of law couldn’t decide what footage is real or fake.

That new computer made design coupled with mass machine manufacturing and it’s desire for new and the handmade has an interesting tension.

There are references to medieval mysticism in the work, handmade drawings of AI created content. Hand printed AI created prints of randomly selected pop culture musicians who died too young regurgitated through print then through AI learning. Then placed onto raw clay. The pots shape references the Greek classical antiquity; a period of rapid advancement in philosophy and maths. It’s crude and unapologetically falling apart, spliced back together, falling again.

So many questions for the current time we live in.

Ceramic Stoneware

20 x 20 cm

Decal, underglaze, slipcasting, sprig & 20k gold lustre