The Artist: Claire Silver
Claire Silver is a visionary artist who forages in the invisible mind of artificial intelligence to recover echoes of what feels familiar from traditional portraiture. As a pioneer in the AI art movement, she is celebrated and chastised for her whole hearted hug of the machine. The collections titled ‘AI Art is Not Art’ a response to the digital jeering that earlier collection ‘Genesis’ attracted. Undettered, Silver continued her friendship with the machine releasing ‘Paracosm’, ‘Pixelgeist’ and ‘Corporeal.’
The Collection: "Pixelgeist"
MAY 25th, 2023
In contrast to her other collections where Silver filters the millions of prompts down to just a few hundred, Pixelgeist lets loose giving us a whopping 2,136 artworks to enjoy. Consequently, the Pixelgeist collection also represents the most accessible way to own a Claire Silver AI.
Don’t let the collab ‘RSTLSS’ a decentralized game asset company put you off. These artworks are very much recognised as the AI induced portrait hallucinations of Silver.
A Specific Artwork: Pixelgeist #986
A standout piece in the Pixelgeist collection, #986 captures the essence of Claire Silver’s artistic philosophy. The combination of butterflies and beauty takes a contorted turn as the large language model she trained herself, decides to express the prompted desire through butterfly ears. We recognise the primary subject yet her gaze is occluded through the tell tale signs of AI’s early inability to reproduce the soul a human recognised through our eyes. It is as if the image is a memory partially erased or reconstructed, reflecting the imperfections of human recollection through the lens of AI.
Silver reaffirms her position as a leading promptoor in the early discovery of what art can tell us about the artificial higher power we will be increasingly sharing our lives with.