There is something absurd, almost comical, about using AI
to create a series of folk objects. Perhaps this is because
folk art and craft are closely entwined with the inherited
traditions of a community, and nothing could be more
diametrically opposite to this than the instantaneity and
indifference of generative AI. It is amusing and bizarre to
observe AI concocting a sense of raw authenticity. In a
matter of seconds, the roughly hewn and stitched, the
gauche and vernacular, are ‘sculpted’ in near perfect mimicry.
There is something disturbing about this too. Folk practices
hold an earthy integrity shaped by daily life. High art idealism
or the purely conceptual have no value in this parallel creative
world of unfettered figuration and heartfelt decorative flourish.
And possibly for this reason, the algorithmic conjuring of
images, indifferently faking folk artefacts, seems all the more
sinister; suggesting perhaps that digital creative output has
finally begun to usurp the purely human variety of art making.
Folk culture, in particular, could well be seen as a last vestige
of uniquely human activity in that it is organically formed through
lineage, and has its feet in a now misty age of pre-modernity.
We might think that, on the one hand, we ought not to fear the
digital conjuring trick of AI, where our own cannibalised data is
mirrored back to us as newly made material. But on the other,
we might ask where is this leading, and what should we make
of the slow erosion of creative thinking and practice that is
driven by lived experience?
Craftwork
II (2024)
