POND AND SCUM – Drooping Signals, 2022
Video (NVIDIA’s Canvas AI, copy.ai)
Kevin Yatsu grew up on the west coast of the United States and has spent much of his life near the Japanese internment camps where his grandparents were imprisoned during World War II. This proximity to deep generational traumas informs Yatsu’s approach to landscape and personal history. POND AND SCUM – Drooping Signals is part of an ongoing project of sustained engagement with personally-charged landscapes. In this iteration, Yatsu revisits a field that he frequented as a child in Oregon. The field’s change over a ten-year period – from a backyard, to a local secret hangout, to a well-traversed trail – emphasizes how ongoing relationships with familiar landscapes shift across time. POND AND SCUM – Drooping Signals envisions the same field in a post-apocalyptic Earth that is centuries into the extreme future. In this timeline, an android imagines the colorful, flowering rock as the “soul” of the field that has become long-forgotten. With images produced using NVIDIA’s Canvas AI and the android’s poetic observations generated with copy.ai, the artwork imagines a future where machines grapple with the remnants of human life.
Artist Bio
Kevin Yatsu is an artist who works with digital and physical media to explore diaspora narratives based in magical realism and the creation of life-flexible creative ecosystems. Utilizing game engines and AI-driven tools, virtual galleries and interactive installations, he creates multi-media interactions within unexpected environments. In Yatsu’s worlds, permuted presentations and sonic oddities mingle with uncanny situations and environments, inviting the viewer to engage with new perspectives and realities.
Through the lens of East-Asian folklore and Buddhism, he investigates themes of curiosity, identity, and latent histories. He operates using collaboration-friendly systems and intuitive physical-to-digital//digital-to-physical workflows as a response to the tech industry’s agenda. He actively facilitates collaborations with creatives who don’t normally consider presenting works in virtual spaces.
Kevin holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BFA in Cinema Studies from the University of Oregon. He is the Co-Founder and Director of AUGURY HOUSE, an interdisciplinary art collective centered around life-flexible creative collaborations.
Kevin Yatsu on the future of Ai art and culture:
“AI generative art will undoubtedly see abundant and expansive growth when it comes to stronger AI systems and tools. And with all this, knowing what to ask the AI and understanding the biases of the datasets will continue to be an evolving conversation within digital communities.
However, I feel much more interested in the ways by which AI will make it easier for artists to organize, and organize cunningly. For low budget and emerging artists in particular, AI can provide a massive amount of foundational labor when it comes to building contracts, organizational plans, operating procedures, and market research - much of this planning would be absolutely cost and time prohibitive if done through conventional means. By starting out with fully robust organizational and functional plans, we should see auptick of collaborative art practices that are built to last.
In this way, I see the future of AI to be twofold - we should expect see a saturation of AI generative art in art and pop culture as well as blossoming of new art collectives with surprising and malleable structures.”