Modern Ruin I (2023, Giclee print 85cm x 68cm).
                       
  ROGER HOPGOOD           WORK TEXT BIOG   CONTACT
                       

The images in this series are created using AI (artificial intelligence). The choice of landscape as a context for the images is a way of directly contrasting the idea of ‘nature’ with the technological and artificial. Within landscape painting and photography, nature is often seen as timeless and authentic. Where signs of ruin appear in landscapes, there is often an inference of human endeavour, in the end, being defeated and reclaimed by nature. The use of modern ruins in the series could be seen as the collapse of modernism – the empty shells of angular form perhaps suggesting the fall of modernism’s ambitions and optimism. More generally, we might have a sense that established ideals and methodologies are under threat, given the credibility of the AI images and the ease with which they are made. We may feel ourselves to be at the beginning of a new epoch of augmented modernity. Yet, by applying the AI process to the creation of Romantic landscape (landscapes with ruins have their roots in a much earlier time), the algorithms of artificial intelligence have been set a difficult task. Something more than an assemblage of visual elements is required. The generated image must attune to a more poetic state of mind and transcend the mere bringing together of content. Within the series, perhaps there is evidence of some success with this. Or perhaps the fakery of a machine-made outcome can never fully capture what the poets and artists of Romanticism once envisioned.


 

 
MODERN RUINS