Altered Narratives (2024-)

These paintings are inspired by a former scientific/artistic project, Deep Angel, developed by the artist and his team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In this project, which ran in 2018-2019, the team developed an AI that disappears people and objects from images. Nowadays, these capabilities are available in common image editing software, highlighting the ease with which AI can now enable mass-scale media manipulation. 

The paintings depict altered iconic images from the moon landing—an event that has been subjected to numerous conspiracy theories that deny it even took place. The artist, using AI-driven object removal and in-painting, deliberately leaves traces of the astronauts and objects that have been removed, such as a shadow or a ghost. This feature documents the rudimentary early state of AI-based image manipulation technology—the artist’s own scientific research showed that people could learn to better detect machine-manipulated media back in 2019. However, the technology is advancing rapidly, making AI manipulation harder to detect—something that the viewer is invited to ponder.

[More information can be found in the ‘Portraits of the Artificial’ exhibition publication.]