South, London
David Musgrave
Negative Walking Child
GreengrassiThe work in this show has an overt or discreet but always central relationship with technology. The Surveillance insect series is generated by inserting carefully constructed prompts into a commercially available AI image generator. A small handful out of the hundreds of rejected results is reworked in critical ways and printed on silver gelatin paper, a physically rich medium with strong associations of documentary veracity and cultural value. The subject matter gives a metaphorical body to the secretive data collection that underlies most public-facing image generators, which depend on images collated without the permission of their makers, and on users of the tools who are surveilled in their turn. The Scan drawings involve a mechanical sequence of ruled lines which record strips of paper made into embryo-like forms. This process can only ever be followed imperfectly by a human being, and the inaccuracies are as significant as the subject. Neural garden is a more straightforward graphite on paper drawing, but one that owes nothing to direct observation of nature. The only source is a group of AI images which have been freely knitted together and distorted at will. Stick figure (repaired) is a barely readable representation of a taped together figure which, via the very old technology of bronze casting, becomes a durable and enigmatic code sign for the human. Projection for damaged children is an animated film split into two parts. In the daytime sequence, three partly obscured figures are tracked by remote weapons through diagrammatic landscapes based on current war zones. In the night sequence, identical devices project these characters in the same landscapes as three-dimensional images. The animation is assisted by a frame interpolation tool which produces subtly anomalous results where it fails to understand the figurative content of the images. While the figures appear to be the captives or victims of the machines, their actions are gently defiant.