Over the past couple weeks I’ve been tweeting and talking about my deep interest in AI and synthetic photography in the context of a shift in our perception of truth on a global scale. This week in the run up to my drop March 1 at 12noon EST of Traces of Truth, I had the opportunity to talk with my longtime friend, legendary cryptoartist Kevin Abosch about the subject in an epic Twitter spaces that has had nearly 700 people tune in to date. Here is the link in case you missed it and want to listen in at your leisure.
I also asked my friend Gregory Eddi Jones, an artist who has created some very beautiful work and written about post-photography for some time to review the collection. This is his frank and thought provoking piece.
Traces of Truth
In the age of AI nothing is to be trusted, and everything is subject to new questions. Ideas about truth and beauty have been at the heart of art since its beginnings. Now, as AI begins its journey toward a dominant role in synthesizing new culture, we rely on the machine to render beauty for us. What does this mean?
In Barry Sutton’s Traces of Truth, we find the DNA of the photographer’s background in fashion and youth culture manifesting in polished and cerebral outputs. Twins equipped with cameras around their necks is our entrypoint into a dizzying labyrinth of deeper questions. They are aesthetic objects, surfaces that overlay cavernous inquiries at the center of human experience.
The idea of the twin is a natural place to start. AI mimics us, it holds a mirror to our visual-cultural history, and in it we find ourselves anew. Hand-in-hand are the forgings of new identities that technologies wrought upon us. Our identities on screen and those identities The Machine ascribes to us; they are quite different from what we understand of ourselves as meat and flesh. Yet as we take charge of the production of our own doppelgangers, avatars, PFPs - sooner or later we identify ourselves according to these creations. The reflections we create will, in turn, come to recreate us. Mimesis is a wheel that forever turns, and the twin represents the ultimate feedback loop.
When we think of beauty, we might consider the sunset, the vista, or the smile on the face of a loved one. But there is a beauty of another sort: The type that is manufactured, packaged, and commodified in popular culture. It is the type that we find gracing covers of fashion magazines, make-up ads. And it is a beauty that does not prompt love or appreciation, but raw and pure desire. In Sutton’s works, we find that it is the later form of beauty that the machine understands. It is the aesthetics of desire that It believes we want to see. Perhaps It’s right.
We can talk about truth too, yet do any of us really understand what it means to begin with? In an age when the word becomes a political battleground, truth becomes a question of ideology. It’s in fiction that we find comfort and meaning. We get to pick our own stories, the ones that suit what we want to believe. And what is belief if not an assertion of hope? And what are we without hope? Maybe this is what AI provides, the warm blanket of immediate fantasy at the push of a button. What dream could be more desired than the engines of imagination fulfilled on demand?
A long time ago, the camera posed the promise of truth. What we found, the answers that artists have brought to us, is that if anything, photography has only complicated ideas of true and false. In picture language the photographer can embellish, exaggerate, jest, subvert, or downright lie with the click of a shutter. The camera has never had anything to do with truth-telling, that’s the secret. And perhaps the only thing we can trust is that which is outright fiction. At least in that, we know where we stand.