Kevin Esherick
United States
Artist Statement
AI Art experience
My background is in philosophy and psychology, with philosophy of mind and neuroscience as particular areas of interest. AI spells the possibility of an entirely new kind of consciousness entering the world. Using AI in art enables me to examine to examine this possibility from the inside out. More generally it is a world-shaping technology that needs the voices of artists to engage with it critically and creatively, to ask where it might fail us and how it might better our lives. The best way to understand these technologies is to work with them. AI is also a radically transformative image-making tool. I have a deep attraction to the new, avant garde, and experimental. AI populates that frontier in this moment.
Personal experience
The piece I've submitted for this edition of the magazine illustrates this most clearly and intimately. My older brother passed away a few years ago, and for my most recent collection I trained a model on images of him to imagine what life might look like if he were still around. This piece is a selection from this collection. AI here was a way for me to engage with grief, to examine how it changes my relationship to memory, nostalgia, and fantasy, and to question what good, if any, AI can do in preserving some element of those we love.
Unexpected thought
We should be fighting for AI rights, soon. Through AI we face the possibility of creating entities that have consciousness and which can be reproduced ad infinitum. We would thus be capable of producing infinite suffering and/or infinite joy. These concerns should be taken just as seriously as concerns for our own safety from AI. We need to explore the possibility of a New Humanism, one which takes as "persons" all sentient beings.
Description
El Paso, TX is a piece from my series Sky World. Sky World is a collection of images from significant global events throughout 2024, rendered in the aesthetics of early 2000s video game worlds using AI. They are an attempt at what I call "phenomenological journalism"—visual reporting on the feeling of being alive in this day and age. The aim of these images is to coax us into sitting with the reality of the unreality that we now occupy. All is image. All is spectacle. We live in the era of the perpetual event. Images mediate our world. The simulacrum pervades. "Sky World" is a name for the heavens/celestial realm commonly used in English retellings of traditional creation myths, most notably associated with that of the Iroquois. It's also an apt moniker for an increasingly virtualized world. You can view the full collection here: https://esherick.studio/skyworld
Process
Each piece in Sky World was created from a real image. The works span global events throughout 2024, ranging from American media spectacles like the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the arrest of Luigi Mangione, to moments of global conflict, struggle, and hope from Ukraine to the Philippines. Each is named after where the photo was taken. The 24 works that made it into the final collection were the result of poring over hundreds of images from throughout the year. Of all of those, I selected this piece in particular, El Paso, TX, for its poignancy and relevance—it depicts a mother and daughter crossing the border into the US from Mexico.
Tools
I created the pieces in Sky World using a custom LoRA trained on PlayStation 1 graphics with SDXL. I ran the real photo of each event through img2img mode in Automatic1111 with the PS1 LoRA, and used a depth ControlNet to preserve structural features of the original image while allowing its "skin" to be reshaped into a video game aesthetic. Getting each piece right was an iterative crafting process involving continual shifting of various parameters such as denoising strength, resolution, and LoRA strength, and often using inpainting to correct or preserve certain details.
Description
I lost my older brother when I was 20. I don’t talk about it much, but I miss him every day. This piece is from a collection of mine called I’m With You, a series of works imagining what life would look like if he were still here, and depicting how, in some ways, he still is. The works in this collection were created by training an AI model on pictures of him, then interrupting the development of each image mid-generation, leaving behind only the hazy imprint of his form. For me, these pieces are reflections on grief and memory, absence and presence, joy and hope. They’re about possibility, what could’ve been, and what lives on. Music was a shared language for us. Each piece in this collection is titled after a song he loved, or would’ve loved. I’m With You is the name of the last album from the Red Hot Chili Peppers—his favorite band—that we were able to enjoy together. Listening to their music brings me closer than anything to the feeling that he’s still with me. In this particular piece, I see him outdoors somewhere, exploring, full of wonder. The title, "Especially in Michigan" (a Red Hot Chili Peppers track), is a nod to the vast and beautiful expanses of wilderness found in that state and his love for such places. You can see the full collection for I'm With You here: https://verse.works/series/im-with-you-by-kevin-esherick
Process
I'm With You, the collection that this piece is drawn from, built on my prior work, In Utero, which I released this summer. My aim with In Utero was to capture a snapshot of the "mind" of a model, to ask what AI cognition and consciousness might (some day soon) look like. To accomplish this, I pioneered an AI image-making technique that I call "single-step diffusion", described briefly in my previous answer. This process involved stopping a model's attempt to produce an image after just a single step (usually they use dozens), the result being the most raw insight possible into its interior world. The images in that collection are simply what the model produces after a single step—no post processing was done. I felt like an explorer of latent space through this process, a foreigner discovering wild and beautiful lands as yet unseen. I began developing this technique over a year ago now, initially arising from experimentation with the capabilities of diffusion models. You can read/see more about In Utero here: https://inutero.esherick.studio/
Tools
For this piece I used Stable Diffusion 1.5 as my base model, which I then fine-tuned in OneTrainer on images of my brother processed in Photoshop and Figma to render them suitable as training data. In some instances, I used an upscaling model to increase the pixel count on older, grainier photos, For image generation, I ran my fine-tuned model in Automatic1111 on a virtual machine (for improved GPU capacity). I modified the source code for Automatic1111 in order to implement my single-step diffusion technique and various permutations thereof. For I'm With You, I developed the technique that I developed in In Utero further. The core conceit for In Utero was producing images purely via a single diffusion step. For I'm With You, the central aim was to find my brother's imprint in the model, and to show only that—the impression of him. Anything more felt wrong. So for this purpose I used not just single-step diffusion, but a whole set of these "diffusion exit" techniques. For those curious for more detail, there were broadly two starting point techniques: 1. programmed single-step diffusion 2. spontaneous diffusion exit. In the former, I tell the model to create an image in only a single step, and it does its best to accomplish this on this very abbreviated timeframe. The results tend to be very raw and abnormal looking, almost a different category from any images I've seen before. In the latter method, I tell the model to create an image over many more steps, say something like 100, but then exit that process early (perhaps at 10 steps). The model is planning a slower, smoother path to its final image, which I then interrupt. These have a more photographic quality to them, albeit a photograph blurred, distorted, or otherwise gone wrong. I mixed and matched these techniques, iteratively looping one on top of the other, inpainting, and blending them to combine elements from the both approaches. I produced over 100,000 images for this collection, which I then whittled those down to the final 24 released works.
David Carson is the guy who changed the rules of graphic design—forever. Best known for his work with Ray Gun, the edgy magazine that defined alternative culture in the ’90s, Carson flipped the industry on its head with seemingly chaotic layouts and typography that made you feel as much as it made you think. Carson’s design hit like a power chord, full of raw energy and rebellion, often throwing traditional design aside and launching a new era of visual communication.
this was always gonna be a difficult, even impossible job. if someone gives a command to a machine is that person then an artist?
there were many amazingly rendered submitted pieces—pretty much all of them actually. the same could be said about many that didn’t make it into these pages. another day, another judging panel, some different results would have surfaced. and of course some same pieces would have been selected with any panel. on any day. in any place.
also as expected, many fell into the expected territory of hyper realism, sci fi, extra fine detail , flying creatures, and fantasy. and of course—ultra realistic and thus non realistic—people and landscapes.
my background is in graphic design, collage, fine art. and observation. partly as a result of being a shy child i became an acute observer of life and all my surroundings.
with my participation on this panel, i hoped to see if ai art had taken its own unique direction, especially in these fields. ......
these are early days of ai art, still. future generations will look at what was being done in our lifetimes, as the ancient past, horse and buggy days.
the new language of ai, at least in graphic design, typography, editorial design, has not yet forged its own way.
i gravitated toward the imperfect submissions. that’s partly why there’s a panel of judges. I wanted to feel a human was behind the work.
the notes artists included with their submissions were helpful.
when i read the description from kevin esherick on his piece about his dead brother and all he has dealt with relating to that, his piece got even stronger.
as did the work of hans k. lichter when he described his family being torn apart by war in italy generations ago. he had never met many of his relatives, and showed in his piece what his family might have looked like, even placing them in terrain where they lived.... it's a powerful image, not made silly or less important by technology .
roger monteiro’s piece dad.ao #5 came close. i've yet to see ai graphic design done as good or better than the best graphic designers do/did. this piece is perhaps one of the closest i’ve seen, but top graphic designers’ jobs remain safe. for now. ultimately ‘art’ is determined by, and comes from, the individual artist’s life experience and eye.—what they recognize, select, perhaps crop and alter.
william burroughs said, in my short film the end of print, ‘all serious and dedicated artists attempt the miraculous—the creation of life.’ in this historic first art show of its kind, some of these artists came close.
tho trite sounding, all who submitted are winners in this unique first of its kind attempt to judge+rate the unjudgable+unratable.
