Eli Horn
Paintings for Minds’ Eyes, 2024
In recent decades image production has been driven into a frenzy, first when every person with a mobile phone became a photographer, and recently with generative AI giving anyone with an internet connection the ability to illustrate in every recorded style in human history. The hyper-imaged world brought curatorial practice to the fore as the production of new images naturally declined in value, and the discovering, filtering, sorting and presenting of images became increasingly necessary. But when images can flourish and proliferate to the degree made possible by generative AI how can the curation of imagery, let alone its production, be meaningful?
Since the 1950s artists like Joseph Kosuth, On Kawara, and Yoko Ono already declared the image as ornamental, reducing art to its essential, conceptual ideal. Today images resemble zombie hoards, propelled by unliving (algorithmic) forces and viral propagation. Maybe images are not totally (un)dead, but their value now relies entirely on conceptual (or at the very least, contextual) understanding. The days of experiencing meaning through pure image is long gone.
How can we relate to a painting by a computer, except conceptually? Just as the medium of photography is not the construction of the lenses or the sensors, but the framing of the image and the release of the shutter, the medium of generative art (at least for most people) is not programming, but prompting. Focusing on the text prompts behind generative AI images, rather than the imagery itself, allows us to look more closely at this new medium we all now find ourselves dabbling in. Are these texts in and of themselves forms of conceptual art, and just as we all become photographers after 2007, are we now all becoming conceptual artists? Or is this simply an impoverishment of the act of creation, reducing image making to captioning?
By framing prompts in the aesthetic and material language of conceptual art this work allows us to look at the prompts in isolation from the images they are meant to produce and discern the value of them as conceptual objects. It also begs the question (not new) of whether the image is necessary to our experience of the art. If generative AI looks at these texts and sees images, do we even need the images to feel the meaning of the work, or can we not also see the meaning in our own mind’s eye?
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Eli Horn (b. 1986) is a visual artist based in Salt Spring Island, Canada, on the unceded and traditional territories of the Coast Salish People. His multidisciplinary practice spans traditional and digital media, drawing on a background in graphic design and computer programming. His work explores tensions between surface and depth, and the liminal and affective dimensions beyond immediate apprehension.
Eli is a founding partner of the creative studio Memory.