Richard Paul
I have recently embarked on a new series of work entitled 'Kaolin and morphine.'
'Kaolin and morphine' is an ongoing series of 3D lenticular photographic prints initially imagined by AI: convincing similcra of possible but non-existent contemporary artefacts. I wanted to create new versions of familiar objects; my own hybrids. I had in mind both Andre Malraux’s Musée imaginaire or imaginary museum: each person’s ideal collection of works – the works he or she most admires – drawn today from our vast ‘universal world of art’ (Malraux scholar Derek Allen); and J. L. Borges’ The Library of Babel, which is, as Jonathan Basile summarises as: a universal library containing, in 410-page volumes, every possible permutation of twenty-two letters, spaces, commas, and periods—every book that’s ever been written and every book that ever could be, drowned out by endless pages of gibberish.
I used an AI program to create virtual models with images of my concrete sculptures. I prompted the program through text descriptions to imagine heads and masks in various materials. After trying many different iterations, I selected the most materially convincing (as artefacts) and converted these small 2D images into 3D and printed them as lenticulars. Looked at closely (and with some information on how the images are conceived) it is possible to see a genealogy of the physiognomy of the heads and masks, as though they had been produced through some form of evolution.
My initial idea when using the program was to get it to produce alternative versions of my concrete work to give me ideas for future objects. I realised that getting it to imagine objects in materials that I could not afford or had little chance of making was more productive and related back to ideas I had around the transparency of photography. Artefact photography is intentionally the most 'neutral' form of the medium, providing documentary evidence/archival material of a collection, private or institutional. Certainly, the lenticulars begin to depart from this idea but somehow produce a firmer guarantee of the objects' existence.
I chose Kaolin and morphine as the title as it encapsulates both the physical and hallucinatory quality of the series. Kaolin and morphine is a cough syrup combining the clay mineral kaolin, with a small quantity of morphine. The first images I made that I felt were successful, where I asked the program to make heads made of porcelain in a tattoo and delftware pattern - gave the series its name. I would suggest that we lack a common symbolic culture that would produce a recognisable series of sculpted heads, but this has not stopped us from continuing to produce images or physical objects that would fit the description 'head' or 'portrait'. I think these works reflect the imaginary museum that we have access to, particularly in our period of social media, where we see images more in synchronic rather than diachronic form, without, it seems, hierarchy.
I had previously considered AI in image-making to be the preserve of fantasy or neo-surrealist illustration, or in the disturbing possibilities of deep fakes, and it obviously upends our belief in the factual nature of the image. But I'm trying to imagine it as a useful tool, in which the technology is used in the service of the idea, although the title also nods to Will Self's cautionary tale of kaolin and morphine addiction: Scale.
