(…the color and the image, and its portents, already burnt into her retinas…)
The original, real, images that Lee used as preliminary references for a generative AI to come up with the final reference for her works in Times: Expansion of Matter, were a collection of explosions resulting from missile strikes in the early stages of the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran. The image composed by the AI, adjusted and tweaked by Lee through the generation and “evolution” process, is a grand-yet-sterile guess at what an apocalyptic mass of explosions might look like. Its oranges are garish, its whites searing, the towers of fire and smoke imposing. Yet one instinctively feels reluctant to be moved by them. The AI-generated explosions—the image itself and its manner of creation—embody a kind of colonialism and annihilation that operates both on an internal and external scale; one of imperialist violence on a geopolitical scale and the other machinations to enslave critical thought and the psyche.
[One-million pixels, rendered into digital existence by the generative AI through a text-based prompt/34 million AI images are generated per day/ “Scraping of personal data, to be used in AI LLM training, violates nearly every key principle embodied in privacy law’s frameworks and codes”/Claude-Project Maven/1,000 military strike targets per hour/ Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ Elementary School]
(...liquid drips within the seer’s bosom as she works her arm in repeated motions. Her gaze latched to the mead-colored mirror, working it until the images augured by the machine emerges with the efforts of her body…with each movement of her hand she advances the slow march of decay…)
Lee’s works for the exhibition are ones made from a sense of defeatism about the general state of modern life and society, and the seemingly-obsolete role of the artist (as makers of meaning through imagery) within it. She thinks of her work and her making of it as nigh-futile—that it will be inevitably lost and soon forgotten in the ceaseless influx of stimulus that all of us are inundated with in the Information Age. Articulating these fatalistic thoughts through the AI-generated image of the explosion she seared and polished onto the copper sheets, where the spectacle of it will inexorably fade away in a determinate amount of time, precisely doing this specific material process because of its inevitability of oblivion. She “drew” the images generated by the model through manual, technical means; polishing by hand and heating with a heat gun. Through those processes, parts of the copper sheets reached a mirror-like sheen while in other parts, details of the referenced image appear through an accumulation of patina and oxidation. Little by little, through techniques that induce the decay of the material, the explosion corrodes into a material existence. As Lee formed the images through the efforts of her hands, her skin’s oils inevitably seeped into the sheets, imparting a kind of warmth into the image of the explosion as she worked to make the likeness of it emerge from the copper sheets. Parts of the explosion now seem more akin to images of cloudy sunsets rather than visions of an ultra-violent cataclysm. Her actions and biology as a human being seemingly acted as a salve against her profane reference.
[Patina and oxidation/ Cupric Oxide/Heat gun/ Metal polish/ Cotton cloth rag/ “Costing more than 2 million Dollars each, a tomahawk missile travels at 855 kilometers per hour, with 1,000 lbs of explosives in each of its warheads”/Over 100 children killed in the US airstrike in Minab]
(The King’s Evil…it takes root in the different corners of the body as one’s soul imprints itself into the mirror; in one’s kidneys, lungs, and right into one’s brain, it nestles between its gray folds; where thought used to thrive, now pestilent rot has it as its hive…)
Lee is aware of the double-edged nature of her tools: in copper and in generative AI. How the things that are useful to her incur hazards just the same: Poisoning with prolonged exposure to copper, psychosis with excessive use of LLM AI programs. For Lee, the image of the explosion and the violence that it represents—along with everything and everyone else—would inevitably fade out of existence and out of memory, and that is at least worth some consolation.
Despair and hope, concession and a glimmer of resistance, shrapnel and pixel, emerging piecemeal.
[Philippines awards Pax Silica 4,000 acres of land in New Clark City as an AI hub/ “The Philippines holds significant reserves of nickel, copper, chromite, and cobalt—minerals increasingly vital to global supply chains”/ VITRO Sta. Rosa, Laguna/ “There are no American military bases in the Philippines”/ (as of writing) more than 3,000 people were killed throughout Iran during the war]
(Each fragment of fire is carefully laid onto their metal cradles, as if, only for a moment, to save each of them from the inevitable obscurity and oblivion that awaits all. The seer, afflicted, casting decay into her scrying mirror with the wish for her doom to find her sooner. But working its surface for days on end, through the clutter and the taint, she finally saw her face reflected back at her. Meeting herself within her own gaze she found what purpose there was in her own making, and why it was so valuable, and in the same instance how the mirror was deeply treacherous…)
Neo Maestro