Folkless

Description

Folkless is a series of images where generative AI has been used to create seemingly real folk objects, many of which strike us as absurd. There is something mildly comical in this process, both in the contradictory nature of these polar opposites but also in the way in which AI mimics the raw authenticity of folk artefacts – the roughly hewn and stiched, the gauche and vernacular. Even so, there is a darker tone to this algorithmic conjuring of images. The near perfect mimicry of objects shaped by human tradition and creative whim might suggest that digital output has finally begun to usurp the purely human variety of art making, erasing the process of creativity driven by lived experience.