Full details of work in pdf
BLISS (2023) by Miti Ruangkritya continues the artist's long-term interest in the intervention of the man-made landscape as seen in DREAM PROPERTY (2014-ongoing) and The Sunset series (2018-2020), while further exploring the effects of technology on photography as seen in Thai Politics (2006-ongoing).
Drawing inspiration from the famous green rolling hills of the Windows XP wallpaper image Bliss by photographer Charles O'Rear, BLISS employs generative AI techniques that interpret text, images, and sound to explore the life of an image and what makes it iconic.
The exhibition incorporates a range of mediums, including digital and film photography, moving images, hand-pulled screen prints, archival and found images sourced from the web. Through this diverse approach, BLISS explores questions around authorship, the biased gaze of technology, the search for an ideal, and the shifting nature of physicality in an increasingly digital age.
BLISS 3D (2023)
A chromed 3D logo featuring BLISS with movement inside an iPhone 6 that was released in 2014, the year that Windows XP ended its support.
Medium/Technique: 3D graphic presented on a discontinued iPhone 6.
Sunset, Sunrise Overture (2023)
Sunset, Sunrise Overture is a two-channel video installation in colour, without sound, lasting 12 minutes and 50 seconds. The videos, edited to sync with each other, feature a sunrise and a sunset captured over a comparable man-made landscape.
Medium/Technique: Two-channel digital video HD, silent, 12.50 minutes.
Sharecropper's grave in Hale County, Alabama (1936)
Sharecropper's grave in Hale County, Alabama (1936), is a photograph taken by Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) during the period of the Great Depression (1930s). Evans documented the lives of impoverished farmers for the Farm Security Administration, a governmental agency aimed at fighting rural poverty. Evan?s images appeared in the magazines Life, Time and Fortune, as well as in the book he published with James Agee, titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Provenance: Part of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017762335/
Original Medium: Nitrate Negative
Medium/Technique: Gicl?e print on Ilford Gold Fibre Gloss paper. Framed in a traditional Oak wooden frame with a Museum glass.
Variations of a Hill op.1 (2022)
Variations of a Hill op.1 is a series of ninety images generated through a dialogue between Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image applications based on Bliss (1996), the photograph taken by Charles O'Rear of a green hill under a blue sky in the Napa Valley, USA that is best known as the default wallpaper for Microsoft's Windows XP (2001-2014). Generative AI was used to interpret Bliss into a descriptive text that was then paired with the original Bliss photograph and put through a Text-to-Image AI application, thus creating a new image. This process of converting Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image was then repeated 90 times to generate an extended series of images. Variations of a Hill op.1 raises questions about the authorship of the images created and their tribute to the original photograph from which they derive, while exemplifying the high degree of uncontrollable mutability effected by the AI software. The ninety computer-generated images were then transferred onto metal plates, thereby raising questions about the physical fixity of images in an increasingly digital age.
These generated landscapes are a reminder of 'unifunctional landscapes' (Urry, 1990). A term for landscape that has been simplified and homogenized for human use. This connects to my interest in observing homogenized man-made interiors and landscapes, such as the living interiors in Room and Room no.2 (2014-16 and 2020); the interior and the cityscape within and around the Ghost Tower from the 1997 Asian financial crash in Sathorn Sunset (2018); and the ubiquitous presence of over 13,000 7-eleven stores dotted across Thailand in A Convenient Sunset (2019).
Medium/Technique: Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image generative AI applications. Dye sublimation print on ChromaLuxe.
Link: https://replicate.com/methexis-inc/img2prompt
Link: https://diffusionbee.com/
Variations of a Hill op.2 (2023)
Variations of a Hill op.2 consists of an artist's cloned voice narrating ninety paragraphs of descriptive text created through an Image-to-Text application. The ninety paragraphs of narration correspond to the ninety images of Variations of a Hill op.1 (2022).
Medium/Technique: Artist own voice cloned by Descript and presented on 3 speakers.
Link: https://www.descript.com/
Footnote with a Chatbot (2022-23)
Footnote with a Chatbot is an archive of Q&As between the artist and an AI chat application. The piece covers various arguments surrounding BLISS and its creation through a series of questions with a varying degree of pertinence.
Medium/Technique: OpenAI chatbot. Laser print on standard locally sourced A4 paper.
Link: https://chat.openai.com/
BLISS 01_Landscape xx (2022-23)
BLISS 01_Landscape 01 and BLISS 01_Landscape 10 are part of a collection of landscape photographs inspired by the iconic Bliss wallpaper image. The photographs of the collection depict a man-made landscape captured multiple times from the same location at different dates and times.
Medium/Technique: Digital Medium Format Camera. Gicl?e print on Ilford Smooth Pearl. Dibond mount.
BLISS 01_Landscape 01_DREAM PROPERTY (2023)
BLISS 01_Landscape 01_DREAM PROPERTY is part of a collection of digitally altered images obtained from BLISS 01 through a process of interpretation by generative AI. BLISS 01_Landscape 01_DREAM PROPERTY was created using the original photograph of BLISS 01_Landscape 01 with an added input of DREAM PROPERTY; the artist's long term project on man-made landscape and the city. The altered digital image obtained was then transferred to an analogue process using hand-pulled screen-printing technique.
Medium/Technique: Digital Medium Format photograph altered text input in DiffusionBee. Hand pulled screen print.
Link: https://diffusionbee.com/
BLISS 01_Landscape 10_DREAM PROPERTY (2023)
BLISS 01_Landscape 10_DREAM PROPERTY is part of a collection of digitally altered images obtained from BLISS 01 through a process of interpretation by generative AI. BLISS 01_Landscape 10_DREAM PROPERTY was created using the original photograph of BLISS 01_Landscape 10 with an added input of DREAM PROPERTY; the artist's long term project on man-made landscape and the city. The altered digital image obtained was then transferred to an analogue process using hand-pulled screen-printing technique.
Medium/Technique: Digital Medium Format photograph altered text input in DiffusionBee.
Hand pulled screen print.
Link: https://diffusionbee.com/
BLISS 02_Landscape xx (2022)
BLISS 02_Landscape 01, BLISS 02_Landscape 03, BLISS 02_Landscape 04, BLISS 02_Landscape 05 and BLISS 02_Landscape 06 are part of a collection of landscape photographs inspired by the iconic Bliss wallpaper image. The collection depicts a man-made landscape captured multiple times from the same location at different dates and times.
Medium/Technique: Digital Medium Format Camera. Gicl?e print on Ilford Smooth Pearl. Dibond mount and projection on a wall.
Unnamed drives (2022)
Unnamed drives 01, Unnamed drives 02 and Unnamed drives 03 are a series of landscape photographs of newly built roads taken at night inside a private residential neighbourhood.
Medium/Technique: Digital Medium Format Camera. Gicl?e print on Sihl Baryta. Dibond mount.
A worker tending golf green (2022)
A worker tending golf green (2022) depicts a man-made landscape that has been precisely designed with carefully selected animals, accurately positioned trees, meticulously maintained grass, and an artificially created hill and lake. The pristine lush forest and range of mountains in the background provide a contrast to the fabricated golf course.
Medium/Technique: Digital Medium Format Camera. Gicl?e print on Awagami Bamboo. Dibond mount.
A worker spraying golf green during sunset (2022)
A worker spraying golf green during sunset is a series of five photographs taken in a golf course, a man-made landscape that has been precisely designed with carefully selected animals, accurately positioned trees, meticulously maintained grass, and an artificially created hill and lake. The pristine lush forest and range of mountains in the background provide a contrast to the fabricated golf course.
New Jeans pointing at Bliss (2022)
Found photographs on the web of members of New Jeans; a Korean girl group pointing a finger at a Bliss inspired photograph.
Original Medium: Found image on the web.
Medium/Technique: Inkjet sticker print on standard matte paper.
Erosion near Oxford, Mississippi (1936)
Erosion near Oxford, Mississippi is a photograph taken by Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) during the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration. The image is one of the many photographs that Evans took of the American South's physical and social landscape during the 1930s.
Evans documented the lives of impoverished farmers for the Farm Security Administration, a governmental agency aimed at fighting rural poverty. Evan's images appeared in the magazines Life, Time and Fortune, as well as in the book he published with James Agee, titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Provenance: Part of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017760039/
Original Medium: Nitrate Negative
Medium/Technique: Gicl?e print on Ilford Gold Fibre Gloss paper. Framed in a traditional Oak wooden frame with a Museum glass.
Variations of an Erosion op.1 (2022)
Variations of an Erosion op.1 is a series of one hundred images generated through a dialogue between Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image applications. The series uses Walker Evans's Erosion near Oxford, Mississippi (1936) as a starting point.
The black and white photograph was processed through generative AI and interpreted into descriptive text. The generated text was then paired with the original Erosion near Oxford, Mississippi and processed through a Text-to-Image AI application, thus creating a new image. The process of converting Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image was then repeated a hundred times to produce the entirety of the images of the series.
The dialogue between the two forms of generative AI applications created a series of surreal visual pieces; taken the viewer through an AI gaze from the original black and white photograph of an eroded landscape to portrayals of of black women in a sexualised manner, recurring zebra stripes and abstract fragments of faces and variations of trees that finally morphed into series of stained glass window thus reminding us the boundaries and constraints and the perception and interpretation of a generative AI model.
To create these seemingly ephemeral digital images, Variations of an Erosion op.1 was transferred onto expired film by using a medium format camera to capture the digital version of the image on a computer monitor. The use of expired films added an additional level of unpredictability to the process. The photographs were then hand printed in the darkroom and transformed into a physical object by mounting on Dibond; thereby raising questions about the physical fixity of images in an increasingly digital age.
Provenance: Part of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017760039/
Medium/Technique: Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image generative AI applications. Photograph of 100 digital images on the computer monitor by using expired 120 films. Hand printed in the dark room with Kodak Pearl paper and mounted on Dibond.
Link: https://replicate.com/methexis-inc/img2prompt
Link: https://diffusionbee.com/