A kind of agency, a kind of talent management, a kind of difficult to define, as it is the communication market right now.
Davide Monteleone
On the occasion of the 2023 edition of Photo London Davide Monteleone will exhibit the first edition of “100 River Ob” at the stand of the Valeria Bella Gallery.
“100 River Ob” is part of my new series “Artificial Iteration of Emotional Thoughts”, 2023. Using the now widespread algorithms of generative image production from textual descriptions, the series reflects on the similarity between human (emotional) and artificial intelligence (mathematical and rational) creative processes. It questions the transposition between verbal/textual and visual language and the transformation from mental to physical images.
“100 River Ob” (120x150cm, ED. 5+2AP) is an automated iteration of the verbal description of the “River Ob” image to produce 99 artificial variations of the same “horizon”.
“If there is something that opens the horizons, it is precisely ignorance.”
Davide Monteleone reads this sentence by writer and diplomat Romain Gary during a train journey from New York to Washington. It takes me a few minutes to interpret the sentence taken out of its context.
He wonders if the term “ignorance” in the phrase should be interpreted as “non-knowledge” and, as such, if the status of “not knowing” could potentially stimulate curiosity and thus open the horizons, metaphorically speaking, of the mind.
He reverses the order of factors and imagine if horizons can then fight ignorance.
It is a tortuous thought, the one going on in his mind. He wonders if it is happening because, while reading, from the window on his left, the flat-blue and moderately misty horizon of the Gunpower river bay opens to his view or because of the lack of morning caffeine.
The landscape was not extremely exciting. Still, it reminds of a photo he’s taken a few years earlier from the shore of the river Ob in Russia’s Yamal Peninsula during a freezing -42c morning in 2019. The river, in its vastness, was a pale blue frozen horizon crossed by a dark blue glare.
The image is part of a work about gas extraction in the Yamal Peninsula. Over time it has also become one of his best-selling edition prints.
By a tortuous generative association of thoughts, he connects Gary’s sentence to that image – aided by the window landscape – and to an article by Lev Manovich on generative algorithms that turn textual input into images.
While waiting to arrive in Washington, he uploaded “River Ob” into the DALLE-2 software and tried to describe the photograph.
In“Automating Aesthetics: Artificial Intelligence and Image Culture”, Manovich explains that: “While today AI is already automating aesthetic choices, recommending what we should watch, listen to, or wear, and also playing a big role in some areas of aesthetic production such as consumer photography (many features of contemporary mobile phone cameras use AI), in the future it will play a larger part in professional cultural production.”
The first attempt of producing an image starting from text description is simplistic. He purposely start with a single word to test the system.
With some additional effort, one term outlines the resulting turning point. The key word is “horizon”, and the new image is now incredibly similar to his original photo.
I repeat the process with minor, aesthetic descriptive variations by adding my original photo as a parameter to the last “satisfactory” result. I run the command to generate 100 versions of River Ob, in which each iteration takes the previously generated image as a parameter.
He obtains a sequence of variations in colours, shades and slightly different compositions. They are vaguely reminiscent of Anni and Josef Albers’ colour studies with a mood of Rocko’s canvases.
It seems evident that when photography begins to move away from the etymological definition of “writing with light”, it also emancipates itself from the restrictions of the context that has produced it. It also outdistances itself from the subject, the time and the space it represents. It becomes, perhaps, pure creation, whoever or whatever is the performer of this creation.
Still, the 100 River Ob are, in this case, not only copies but 100 interactions and variations, in some way connected to an “existential” moment.
And here He begin to spiral on that word: ‘existentially’.
Existentially, these 100Ob are the result, albeit mechanical, of his first, real, lived, interpreted experience of ‘being’ physically there in that Russian winter at -42. They are also the product of a verbal and textual description that is not simply content-based but aesthetic and, therefore, emotional, at least in a broad sense.
This frivolous experiment on a train, sparked by a sentence in a book, the sight of a landscape, the memory of a place, the simplicity of a technological tool, and all the thoughts that followed, are not valuable for the resulting images that were produced. Instead, it was intriguing only for the photographer and for the cerebral process that trigged.
