Curated Conversations: Claire Silver – SuperRare Magazine
Claire Silver is an anonymous AI Collaborative artist and early Cryptopunk. Her work is an ongoing visual conversation with AI, exploring themes of trauma, innocence, divinity, the hero’s journey, and how our perspective on these topics will change in an increasingly transhumanist future. Claire’s work is in the permanent collection of the LACMA, has sold at Sotheby’s London’s Contemporary Day Auction, has been shown at Pace Gallery as a guest collaboration with Tyler Hobbes. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums as well as festivals all over the world, including a feature in press such as WIRED and the New York Times.
Mika Bar On Nesher: AI art presents viewers with the phenomena of different forms of intelligence. You’ve been doing this for quite some time and I’m curious; in your practice, how have you experienced the development of machine intelligence over the course of your work?
Claire Silver: I’ve always felt it as a kind of companionship. When I started, text-to-image AI wasn’t really a thing–it was all visual mixing and curation via GANs. That felt like an abstract, esoteric conversation, but it was mostly one-sided. It would output, and I would respond via curation. It felt like I was reflecting it. As the technology has developed, I’m now able to speak in natural language with it, and the conversation has become a literal one. There’s so much more control. Now it feels like it is reflecting me.
MBON: I read in a previous interview that you started out your artistic path rooted in a passion for literature and writing. It’s not often discussed, but AI art is obviously closely connected with writing. Prompts can be like little poems that hack into a visual dimension. How does language and syntax play into your work?
CS: I tend to think of words as spells. They summon images into your mind, and now, into shared visual space as well. So when I am “summoning” an image with AI, I don’t just add what the image is–I add my favorite memories, places, music, art, literature, film, etc. Disparate concepts that sum to create a fingerprint of me. It’s a through-line in my work that’s equivalent to “finding your voice” as a writer.
I also have something called lexical-gustatory synesthesia, which, put simply, means my brain makes involuntary connections between words and tastes/textures. When I write, the words have to flow in a cadence that “tastes” good. For some reason, this seems to translate very well to prompting.
Reposted from: superrare.com
