Machine Artifice is a series of synthetic images generated through single Text-To-Image prompts using freely accessible artificial intelligence platforms (OpenAI: DALL·E, Microsoft Designer). The results are contact-printed onto silver gelatin paper, merging digital artifice with traditional darkroom processes. 

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Intrinsically linked to text, the images metabolise photographic history. Digested and reconstituted, they predict generic forms of impractical, unusable and impossible tools. Fabricated apparatus and machines that serve no purpose and could never take part in the process of their own making. They resemble objects that long to exist, aspiring to be real. 

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Employing traditional methods of photographic printing, the images gain misplaced credibility. Acts of visual forgery wearing the guise of authenticity. Already outdated on viewing due to AI’s rapidly shifting grasp on photographic language, the work interrogates AI’s visual understanding of the photographic darkroom, but is still not quite there yet. 

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The project will conclude once Text-To-Image based generative AI platforms consistently produce seamless, factual and believable images. Until then, Machine Artifice captures a moment of technological uncertainty, already nostalgic for the present.​