Ian Haig

Australia

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

Some of my favorite things: AI slop as a cultural condition, saturation, repetition, contamination, images without intention, excess, degraded taste, failure, visual noise, algorithmic overproduction, aesthetic collapse, post-taste imagery, AI slop & cultural exhaustion, the parasitic nature of AI, AI slop as abjection. Transhumanism gone wrong, AI malfunctions and bodily glitches, biological errors, AI bodily hallucinations, GMO humans and algorithmIc flesh accidents. I am interested in AI as machine of the unconscious, the reside of the human archive reflecting back to us what it thinks of us in all its weirdness and uncanny haunted images that don't belong, that shouldn't exist but do, images not of this world. AI as a mutant collaborator in the creative process, a remix machine, a synthetic organism spreading on social media. My own work an antidote to the the idealized images on instagram of the exterior body in all its selfie perfection, my work is the inverse, the uncanny, grotesque body turned inside out, the reality of the body, the diseased body, the visceral and abject body. AI slop: Internet ooze, Algorithmic slime, Social media sludge, World Wide Web leakage. Slop is putrefaction humming under the surface. Slop is the quiet fermentation of life itself—the warm rot that keeps us moving, digesting, sweating, salivating, shedding. We are factories of leakage posing as individuals. Every touch, every breath, every hunger is a small leak in the membrane of being. Slop is the human condition.

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

The wild thing about generative AI criticisms, ie: lack of humanity, no soul, unoriginal, lack of intent and meaning, lack of authorship, lack of lived experience, lack of craft, no hand of the artist blah blah..This is precisely why generative AI art is INTERESTING! ie: uncanny images tapping into the data banks of the collective unconscious which the machine reflects back to us. AI is like a bell curve, you often get results in the fat region of the curve, all the banal images, stock advertising photos and average data material of mainstream image culture. But if you explore the outer edges of the bell curve and the possibilities of what's happening in the edges, which is harder to generate cause this material is less represented in the training data you can shift the outputs to something very different, odd, strange, perverse and fucked up

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

Obsolete AI platforms opposed to the latest shiny version of Midjourney. I like AI when it was MUTANT. When AI gets things wrong, too many fingers, extra limbs, melted heads, distorted bodies. AI reflecting back to us our own weird distortion of our selves. As we rush forwards into an increasingly technocratic world of digital ID, data verification and surveillance capitalism, the organic human increasingly represented as a digital vector in the system. My work reminds us of our meat bodies our sacks of flesh that we carry around with us everyday. I also like to think of my AI work as a kind of noise, an irritant, a parasite in the emerging AI control grid

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Ian Haig

Australia