Few things are more exciting to me than transitions, periods in history, art, or time when the future is slowly illuminated, and patterns emerge. It is like to watching the landscape become illuminated in the twilight before dawn or the thrill of watching a photographic image emerge in a developing tray or participating in the evolution of photography into artificial intelligence.
The Eye of Providence is the name for an AI model I trained on 20 black and white photographs of the full beaver moon, calico crab shells, mollusks, and invertebrate marine life on the Gulf of Mexico coastal tide pools. In Black Ice Tears and Calico Eye both images reveal traces of the original compositions the including natural shapes and patterns in the calico print crab shell, the shape and texture of the surface of the full Beaver Moon, starfish shapes, silhouettes, and textures of the night sky. Inspired by Surrealism and Conceptual Art, I was thinking about some of the most iconic images of eyes as symbols including by Man Ray’s Glass Tears, The Eye of Horus, the Eye of Providence on the US dollar, the Virgin Mary’s tears, the Clockwork movie posters designed by Phillip Clark and the Eye of Fatma. My intention was expressed in the abstract written text prompts which included words like minimalist, geometric, Sixties French cinema, black & white full moon landscapes…the prompts change at my direction through hundreds of AI generations and is a verbal, visual collaboration between the training model and myself. I only use source material from my own photographic archives, shot between 2012 and 2024 to train custom models. Their process is reminiscent to the evolving Pokémon, Japanese pocket monsters or Yu-Gi-Oh cards, which I was coerced to memorize when I was raising my son. I selected Ice Tears to represent my response to the current political transition in the US. The Eye of Providence made from the same model but pushes the boundaries of pictorial plasticity by introducing manual drawing in the AI program. This technique rearranges compositional abstractions and represents nascent directions in this work. Selected as Category Winner in Alternative Processes, Black Ice Tears will be exhibited at the Fotonostrum Gallery Mediterranean House of Photography during the 25th Julia Margaret Awards Exhibition this July along with Honorable Mention Third Eye No 9.
My fine art process is more like free association and relies heavily on errors, glitches and misunderstandings between myself and Artificial Intelligence. Man Ray and Lee Miller perfected solarization techniques that were based on process errors. The history of a both art, photography, and culture all provide numerous examples of conceptual misunderstanding, technical errors, or glitches that have led to new ways of seeing the world. I only use Exactly.AI, an ethical UK tech startup created by tech entrepreneur Tonia Samsonova. My introduction to photography began in art school in the early eighties with black and white film photography and the choice to embrace AI was the natural evolution of a lifelong passion and respect for photo-based image making. Initially met with shame and scorn, the work can be misunderstood as perpetuating deception, ‘stealing from artists’ or seen as pure trickery, when in fact it is only trained on my work, and is transparent, authentic, highlights, subverts, exposes, and embraces the glitches of psychological dissonance. It is the most effective medium I have used for manifesting unconscious thoughts directly into the physical world. Fortunately, I found a few progressive venues or galleries or writers who understood this work or were in the vanguard AI, curiously, they were mostly outside of the US. Zsolt Batori, PhD and Borbala Jsaz, PhD, both directors the of Ph21 Gallery in Budapest published two of my AI photobooks this year: Third Eye Three and Memento Mori Vivere. Batori is a photographer, curator, and author of numerous of academic papers on Artificial Intelligence presented at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. I was honored to be awarded a competitive solo exhibition titled “Self Portrait on a Life Raft” in 2024 their Budapest Gallery. Several of my images were selected for the Ph21 Gallery Barcelona exhibition “From Heliography to AI Celebrating Photographic Diversity “in December 2024 and can be viewed online through the gallery website. The exhibition is a remarkably exciting interpretation of international contemporary photo-based image making. The Bureau of Queer Art, Nancy McCrary, Director of SXSE, and Julio Hirsch-Hardy director of FotoNostrum Gallery in Barcelona have all offered much appreciated support for this work. I have a 2025 Sideshow exhibition scheduled for 2025 of FotoNostrum Gallery’s new Barcelona space located next to the Picaso Museum. It’s a collection of referencing Dutch still life painting and science fiction. I am leaving 2024 with gratitude and apprehension, leaving behind burnt bridges, and following an ongoing search for lifelines for my work in the glitch.
BIO:
Nancy Oliveri, 1958 Providence Rhode Island, is a fine art photographer who attended Hartford Art School, CT in the early eighties. She has been the recipient of numerous international awards and exhibitions for her diverse practice which includes 20 self- published photo books, still life and street photography. Her work is influenced by surrealism, conceptual art and her thirty- year career psychoanalytic psychotherapist in NYC and has retired and living on a barrier island in on the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico.
