Description:
AI and traditional darkroom printing
My artist residency for AA2A was with the Derby University Photographic department.
My experimentation with AI and photography has come through my interest in printing and AI art, where my place is within these mediums as a practioner. Books such as Caroline Criado-Perez Invisible Women, Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Umoja Noble address gender bias in technology, product and enviromental design. Technology, including photography have been used to fetishise women and ethnicities from the global majority.
It is through interaction that algorithms change, and my decision to use Dall-E was to start my process, one possibly changing what possible outputs might be of south asian women. I wrote a simple prompt: Young south asian woman sitting on a bench, in the park. I also wanted to try and create a fictional but realistic character, that could be printed on traditional medium to give them an air of reality. The quality of these prints, with the image as a negative is poor, the closest they resemble is a daguerreotype print.
The quality could be improved using another AI generator, but for this project I stayed with DALL-E. I decided to use an original negative from the late 1950s, with an image of my mother before she married my father. I erased her brother who stood next to her, and some miner changed. The prompts I used was the description of how she remembered meeting my dad. A memory that had not been photographed. The reprinted new image is the main image on this page. More of the process can be found on the AA2A blog.
AA2A Artist Residency
Derby University Photography
Project Duration:
6 months
Nov 2022 – May 2023
Tarla Patel 