Category
Embedded Files
Assisted Readymades, Inverted
Assisted Readymades, Inverted
Machine propositions, selected and re-situated
Machine propositions, selected and re-situated
Assisted Readymades, Inverted describes works in which machine-generated propositions are folded back into existing material practices. A painting may be photographed while still in progress, reconstructed digitally, subjected to Generative Fill or Generative Expand, and then returned to the studio as a set of selected possibilities. Some of those possibilities disappear into oil paint; others remain outside the original work and are resolved as UV prints on canvas. The readymade is therefore inverted: rather than selecting an already existing object and relocating it into art, the artist selects from machine-generated possibilities and assigns one a material destination. What matters is not automation but judgement, the point at which prediction is accepted, refused, repainted, printed, or otherwise re-situated. The intervention may remain almost invisible, yet it alters the work’s authorship and temporal structure. Painting, photograph, model and print become successive states of the same problem: how a work can leave its material condition, encounter another intelligence, and return changed.
After Computation — After Picasso
Exhibition: 半手动时代 Semi-Manual Era — 闽吴术作 Gravity Art Museum, Beijing, China.
L'Echo de Paris, after Braque
Detail
Infinite Imagination (Picasso. Cubism, Pigeon, Petit Pois, and 1911) — Detail.
Possibility returned to matter
Possibility returned to matter
The readymade once displaced an object from the world into art. Here the displacement occurs elsewhere: between painting, image, model, and return.
The machine does not supply a finished artwork so much as a field of possible interventions. What matters is not generation alone, but selection, withholding, substitution, and re-entry. A fragment may return to the painting studio and disappear into oil paint; another may remain digital long enough to become a UV print on canvas, carrying the logic of painting without having been painted.
These works occupy an unstable interval between authorship and delegation. The machine proposes forms the artist did not draw, but the work does not belong to the proposal. It belongs to the decision that accepts, rejects, redirects, or materially relocates it.
The inversion lies here: the readymade is no longer found as an existing object. It is found as a generated possibility.
When such a possibility is printed onto canvas, the distinction becomes more acute. The canvas does not return the image to painting. It exposes painting as a field already penetrated by computation, reproduction, simulation, and machine-assisted imagination.
The resulting works are therefore neither demonstrations of AI nor hybrids in the familiar sense. They are closer to ontological transfers: images crossing systems while retaining incompatible claims about where they came from and what they are.
One Infinite Loop — Detail.
Pulled at Four Pins (Picasso. Cubism, Pigeon, Petit Pois, and 1911)
Exhibitions: 半手动时代 Semi-Manual Era — 闽吴术作 Gravity Art Museum, Beijing, China.
Shown in 半手动时代 Semi-Manual Era at Gravity Art Museum, Beijing, in 2024, the works entered a context already concerned with partial automation and incomplete delegation. One response to them was:
“这个真的有点被降维打击的感觉。”
The phrase is difficult to translate cleanly, but its sense of a “dimensional reduction strike” is useful: not because the works descend from some superior technological dimension, but because they compress several incompatible image-spaces—painting, photograph, generative prediction, simulation, print—into one surface.
A kind of taunt remains.
So does the frenzy.
The Machine, the Copy, the Edits, the Filings, and the Doodles.
Exhibitions: 半手动时代 Semi-Manual Era — 闽吴术作 Gravity Art Museum, Beijing, China.
The work is not made by the machine. The machine alters the conditions under which a painting can still claim to have been made.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse