Photos included in the exhibition

Task

Wed: ANALYSIS > review the exhibition and write 500 words incorporating knowledge and understanding from talk by Will Lakeman > 1 blogpost

Writing frame: How does the exhibition make you consider the theme of Nostalgia? How has childhood memories inspired the imagery? Describe photographic techniques used, including AI in the image-making process. In what way are AI images a representation of dreams? Choose one image and analyse in more detail, considering form, concept and aesthetics. Make a final value added judgement on the exhibition as a whole, ie. do you like/ dislike it – provide examples for or against. Would you recommend it to others? If so, why? Include illustration such as installation images from the exhibition. Include also at least one quote from Will Lakeman’s talk or associated publicity material and provide a comment.

Essay

Will Lakeman’s ‘playtime’ project is heavily based around the theme of nostalgia that he felt when visiting Fort Regent as a kid, since it use to be his favourite place on the island. Lakeman’s images try to recreate the emotions and visions he had of the fort as a child, attempting to bring the now run down and abandoned areas of the fort back to the bustling, full of life place he loved. He succeeds at this goal through the help of artificial intelligence and adjusting his images on Photoshop until the image coheres with how he remembers.  

The playtime exhibition makes me consider the theme of nostalgia, since some of the images Lakeman has created make me feel a sense of nostalgia too from spending a lot of time in fort regent when I was younger. For me, I feel as though I relate more to the images of swimming pools or water the most, again mainly due to me swimming often as a young child. For Lakeman, the images he created were all in some way inspired by how he viewed the fort as a child, even stating that one such image was created as a reminder from a time when he had begun to hallucinate by the swimming pool.  

The process Lakeman used to create these images, was to take the photographs in person using his camera and then alter them using ai and prompting the photo to be how he wants it to be. If the images were not going in the way that he wanted, he would edit them in photoshop, enhancing or changing areas before putting it back into the ai. I think that the ai images created feel almost dreamlike, in a sense they’re not realistic but also not too unrealistic. While most images created by ai are colourful and dreamlike as depicted in Lakeman’s project, some ai generated images have the ability to feel almost uncanny in a way. 

Overall, I really like the playtime project since I think the whole idea of introducing ai into our own images is really interesting since it means we can create anything we want in the image. I also think that using ai to recreate past emotions and feelings from childhood is a really unique way to use ai and is something that I would like to see more often. 

Analysis of image: 

This image emits the feeling of being in a galaxy, surrounded by stars with areas of bright colours contrasting against the darkness. I really like this photo, as you can see the resemblance to its real-life counterpart through the lighthouse. The picture also looks more like a painting than a photograph due to the ai altering it, however I still really like everything about it, and I think the painting look just adds texture. I also really like how many details are in the photo, from what looks to be satellites in the top right corner of the image, linking back to the space theme, to the implications of waves at the bottom of the picture using brush strokes.