the images were an attempt to recreate his childhood memories of Fort Regent.
“I have tried to picture things not as they were, but in the strange ways they appear in dreams and hallucinations.” he said he remembers it intensely but owning just a handful of photographs.
As he has autism, he states how much it effects the love and passion he has for Fort Reagent. he said many autistic people have a certain love for specific things, like birds or trains but his is for Fort Regent.
Alongside photography he wanted to experiment with the new potential offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. he wanted to see if he could visualise concepts from just outside reality – by creating collages from photographs and using them as a basis for the Al to respond to. he said There was a lot of trial and error but eventually he made something arguably closer to how he remembers it.
What i like of what he said that some memories are like stories, “some explode in intense fragments of colour and sensation.” “In my mind the Fort can be a place that is alive with the flashing lights of the funfair, the neon hum of video game arcades, cascading fountains of light and water.” this descriptive description shows the longing he has for the past. shows the nostalgia of the place fort reagent. this exhibition is a response to the nostalgia he has for his childhood. this is what makes other people viewing his work nostalgic is well as it forces a person to think on their past. how it makes me feel is not only nostalgic for my own past , but i try to link my childhood with the images, bringing positive memories.
What I like most about his images is how they make me feel uncomfortable but intrigued. every landscape is surreal and out worldly yet it has a sense of comfort in them. they are great representations of dreams as they show that anything is possible. I like how some images are just slightly distorted but you can still tell what the image is of, like with the above image where the only thing that makes the image look abstract is the sky and water, but in others, like the photograph next to it, it is an image representing something, but it’s unclear what that something is. all the shapes and colour make sense but their rearrangement confuses. that’s the images I find most fascinating, the ones that need the viewer to write their own story to them.
As he used AI to produce these images, he said haw over the 2 to 3 years of working on them, AI has grown massively and it threatens to have huge implications for art, culture and even what we understand as the truth of reality.
he said AI is appropriate for what he is trying to do, which is to recreate the way his mind jumbles things together to create memories. he said autism affects his imagination where he cant come up with anything new, but can come up with creative combinations of things seen before. looking at an AI image he has to question how much is reflecting in it of his past and how he remembers it.
This image above is very interesting to me as although there are some distorted shapes to guide you of what’s happening, it is entirely up to the viewer to make a judgement of the scene. different people will see this image as different scenes. as I spoke to my friend he said he saw a merry go round ride, and showed me why he thinks that, suggesting that some of the shapes represent horses and people. I found that interesting as I saw something different, I saw a restaurant on a late night, where people are dinning in, being sat by the tables. This concept is interesting because the image is so abstract that it is unclear what it shows, giving the viewer full freedom of deciding what it could be. this concept links to dreams in general because many might have a basic idea of what they saw in the dream or what they dreamed about, but can’t fully picture it. it feels like a blurred and distant memory, and although the concept of what the dream was about is there, many cant see it in detail. “When you revisit an old memory it isn’t important for everything to make sense.” this quote relates to this image and explains quite why it looks so abstract.
