The discussion this week has been based on authorship and collaboration; this was also the first opportunity for me to work alongside fellow students, creating a short micro-project to present to the cohort.
I have always aired on the side of caution regarding authorship and copyright of imagery, so I was intrigued to hear how far artists were willing to push the boundaries. In particular, the work of Richard Prince was said to have broken the ‘unspoken’ rules between artists. His Cowboys series saw him effectively take photographs of photographs which had originally been commissioned for the Marlboro adverts. When interviewed on the matter, the photographer of the original images said;
“I gave it life, I gave it its first life and it’s my photograph and no one would disagree with that…It's obviously plagiarism...It seems to me to be breaking the golden rule, and that’s a higher law than the law of art or commerce. That’s the ultimate law and he has to live with that.” ABELL, 2008
This consideration of authorship led to some interesting discussions; how do we distinguish plagiarism and collaboration?
· Lifting screen grabs from Google Earth
· Collecting other peoples 'lost' photographs
· Taking other people's images from social media to create a single instillation
These are all known bodies of work that have pushed the boundaries in terms of authorship.
Group Activity
Our group collaboration chose to discuss the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) for the generation of photographic images; to understand its capabilities and question the notion of authorship.
( All the images above have been created using DALL-E image creator)
I have never experimented with AI so was keen to understand the capabilities of this developing technology using the program GALL-E. The first group task involved taking a single photograph which we independently described to DALL-E, intrigued to see how similar our images would be recreated. Initially, I was underwhelmed! The artificial image creation seemed to be lacking depth and the recreation of the human elements appeared unconvincing.
However, I soon came to learn that my input of 20-or-so words probably wasn’t using this system to its full potential when over 400 descriptive words can be used. Nigerian filmmaker Malik Afegbua demonstrates how this complex medium can be used to its full potential in his stunning AI Catwalk series.
I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate, and the use of AI sparked some interesting conversations within the group regarding the ownership of a computer-generated image. I think the consensus was that the AI images could ‘see’, but they could not feel, they were lacking the depth and consideration that can be observed by a human through the lens; however, as a society, we are incredibly accepting of these rapid advances in technology – so who knows what the future will look like for us image makers!
References
BBC News. ‘The Nigerian AI artist reimagining a stylish old age’. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-64260739
photoplusofficial (2008) Photographer Sam Abell talks about Richard Prince [online video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/Um74DKYlta8[Accessed: 10th February 2023]
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