Collages created from AI on display in Southern Light Gallery at AC
Inheritance, WPA, © 2023
By Joe Wyatt, Amarillo College
René West and Mark Penland have been creating collages ever since they could hold scissors, but on their present-day digital odyssey they don’t need scissors.
West, associate professor of photography at Amarillo College (AC), and Penland, a freelance photographer and photography lab manager at Tarrant County College’s Northeast Campus, are now creating art with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
They launched their recent collaboration, which they’ve dubbed the West Penland Alliance (WPA), in the summer of 2023. Ever since, the collagists have been jointly creating large-scale tableaus out of AI images, and their first project, “Poetic Science,” is on display through Oct. 26 at AC’s Southern Light Gallery.
“In this body of work, we are questioning our past, present and future relationship with technology,” WPA’s artist statement articulates. “AI is among the newest technologies redefining our world. We have chosen AI as a partner in this adventure, creating large-scale tableaus from multiple images generated from natural language descriptions called ‘prompts.’
“Creating visual images with words is like writing poetry, except that our AI partner sometime hallucinates. While it makes plenty of mistakes and can go off on tangents, it can also produce accurate portraits of historical figures, specific locations, time periods, and even modern superheroes. Photography has always adapted to the evolving technologies of the day, and generative AI is the current extension of the craft.”
According to West, the title of WPA’s inaugural project, “Poetic Science,” references Ada Lovelace, who in 1843 published what many consider to be the first computer program. Lovelace referred to her algorithmic approach as Poetic Science, a blend of math and imagination.
“Our alliance (WPA) started this summer when a feral cat with a broken paw abruptly changed our travel plans,” West said. “We put our time to good use and started researching AI and how to generate images using prompts instead of cameras.”
Problems arose, West said, when the images generated with AI were too low in resolution and too small for exhibition; and even more so by an ethical dilemma: “Are the images we create ours?”
So, the collaborators instead decided to generate images for the purpose of collaging large-scale tableaus. That’s how “Poetic Science” came to be.
“Mark and I are fluent in photography, digital imaging, and mixed media,” West said. “By working with juxtaposition, narrative, and ambiguity we create visual metaphors in a wide variety of mediums. Embracing chance has long been an aspect of our practice, and we find computational inventions charming.
“Our first WPA project is simply the result of our summer journey exploring the possibilities of creating works of art with artificial intelligence.”
The Southern Light Gallery is located on the first floor of the Ware Student Commons on AC’s Washington Street Campus and is free and open to the public.
