Hautamäki

Finland

Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?

I work as a media artist operating inside systems where human perception and machine logic intersect, overlap, and occasionally break down. My position is neither outside technology as a commentator nor inside it as an engineer, but within a shared field of agency where authorship is distributed and unstable. Artificial intelligence appears in my work not as a tool for optimization or spectacle, but as a fragile, incomplete actor whose errors, gaps, and discontinuities are central to meaning-making. This position is informed by long-term engagement with process-based art, generative systems, and embodied practices. Drawing, photography, sculptural thinking, and algorithmic procedures coexist as parallel modes of inquiry. Rather than delegating creation to a machine, I work in a negotiated space where images, language, and systems respond to each other. What matters is not technological novelty, but how perception, memory, and authorship reorganize when no single agent fully controls the outcome.

Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?

My practice moves along a vector that resists narratives of technological mastery and seamless intelligence. I am drawn toward moments where systems hesitate, forget, or contradict themselves - where language loops, memory degrades, and logic produces affect rather than clarity. These breakdowns are not failures to be corrected, but sites where artificial systems become culturally legible and emotionally relatable. At the same time, my work increasingly moves toward lighter, slower, and more situated methodologies. I develop conversational agents, image archives, and tools that privilege iteration over scale, and local or smaller models over energy-intensive general systems. This vector reflects a commitment to ecological awareness and methodological restraint: redirecting AI away from abstraction and dominance toward attentiveness, friction, and lived context.

How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?

My practice unfolds in hybrid spaces where exhibition environments, computational systems, and everyday experience intersect. Installations, projections, conversational interfaces, and sculptural avatars create situations in which AI is encountered as a present, sometimes awkward participant rather than an invisible infrastructure. The viewer enters a space shaped by ongoing processes instead of finished objects. This space is defined by accumulation and transformation: archives that remix themselves, dialogues that never fully resolve, and systems that behave differently over time. Rather than stabilizing meaning, the work deforms its surroundings by foregrounding process, temporal layering, and decay. AI appears here as a cultural residue: carrying traces of human memory, language, and absence, and reshaping how presence, authorship, and collaboration are experienced.

Published in >

The AI Art Magazine, Number 3

Charlotte, AI generation, 2026.

Hautamäki, Charlotte, AI generation, 2026

Description

The work explores excess, mutation, and perceptual overload through a live resampling process. It builds on a dense, baccanalian image field where bodies, organic matter, and symbolic fragments: pills, eyes, lips, limbs, demons, mycelium - collapse into each other. Rather than depicting a fixed scene, the image functions as an unstable visual ecology in which forms continuously emerge, dissolve, and recombine. Charlotte is not composed in a traditional sense but navigated in real time. Meaning arises through density, repetition, and deformation rather than narrative clarity. The original image’s chaotic energy is preserved while its internal logic is reworked through live intervention, resulting in an image that feels bodily, seductive, and unstable: like a memory fragment that resists settling into a single interpretation.

Process

The work emerged from an urge to return to an older AI-generated image from 2022 and treat it as raw material rather than a finished piece. Instead of refining or correcting the image, I wanted to re-enter it through a live process that allows intuition, speed, and error to shape the outcome. The central question was how far an image can be pushed while still retaining its internal charge. Live editing removes the safety of endless revision. Decisions must be made quickly, and mistakes remain visible. This constraint creates a heightened attentiveness, where the artist responds to the image’s behavior rather than executing a predefined plan. The work follows the tension between control and surrender, exploring how agency can be shared with systems before the image begins to act back.

Tools

The image was created using a live image-editing process based on an earlier Disco Diffusion work (2022). I used a custom, multi-agent editor developed through “vibe coding,” combining experimental parameters with algorithmic brush systems. The process resamples the original image in a clone-stamp like manner, continuously copying and transforming fragments from within the same image space. Depth and movement were built through rapid variations in brush size, opacity, zoom level, and the number of active drawing agents. Multiple agents operated simultaneously, producing interference and layered spatial effects. The image was created without undo or preplanning, aligning the process more closely with drawing or painting than post-production. The final image is the trace of an improvised interaction between human intuition, algorithmic tools, and autonomous agents.

Image credit:

Essay by

Published in:
The AI Art Magazine, Number 3,
April 2026

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Hautamäki

Finland