OnlyGans, 2023 and GPM^GANS, 2023
AI-generated images (Runway ML, Custom trained StyleGan2, Degenerative Design Process in Fusion360)
Artist and educator Jacob Riddle is interested in the connections and disconnections between technology and nature. His artworks explore the dissonant space of AI-generated imagery, navigating the line between “real” and “fabricated” subjects. His ongoing series, OnlyGans, is created by training a generative adversarial network (GAN) with nudes on various amateur pornography subreddits. By creating abstracted bodies that are generated through the eyes of a machine, Riddle asks: “Are they erotic? Are they grotesque? Are they still bodies? Are they normal? Are they SFW?” These questions are put to the test on social media, where the series is posted to the Instagram account @onlygans_onlyfans. The content regulating algorithms on Instagram often read and flag these images as violations – a phenomenon that effectively pits one artificial intelligence technology against another. The images that remain on Instagram thus sit in the uncanny valley between one AI trained to generate nude images and another trained to detect them.
Riddle’s second series in the exhibition, GPM^GANS, also uses generative adversarial networks to investigate an imitation of the natural world: camouflage. Using military camouflage patterns throughout history, Riddle creates a new, machine-generated camouflage that “mimics the mimicry of nature” and serves as a backdrop on which to view AR mushrooms. The project acknowledges the absurdity of replicating the natural world through artificial means while also bringing out the long history of interaction between these two concepts.
Artist Bio
Jacob Riddle is an interdisciplinary artist and educator making work that explores and bridges the disconnect between technology and nature. His work is heavily influenced from his past working in construction and other labor industries as well as his roots being raised along the limestone creeks of the Appalachian foothills. Now he is applying the scrappy ingenuity and exploratory experiential learning that was required to survived in those lower class rural spaces to art, technology, and academia.