FUTURE PASTS, PAST FUTURES

The absurdity of AI-generated art is reminiscent of adolescence. As a teenager, nothing makes sense, everything feels exaggerated and extreme. Expectations about how things will turn out--sometimes met, sometimes not. These expectations are heightened, thanks to hormone changes and a lack of life"s lessons to draw from. Expectations are depicted using AI text-to-image tools. Language has meaning and value, and it carries implications that are understood differently by each individual. 

The absurdity of AI text-to-image outputs is used as a metaphor for making sense of our pasts as teens in Margaret Murphy"s FUTURE PASTS, PAST FUTURES, while simultaneously hypothesizing adolescence in the future. Murphy explores popular adolescent cultural traditions like prom, summers at county fairs, joyrides, house parties, summers pool-side, family vacations, and skate parks with a reverent nostalgia that, in connection with AI, feels almost like last night"s dream. As time passes and memories fade, technology both helps us recall and forget our pasts more swiftly. Murphy"s series attempts to comprehend the perspectives of adolescent absurdities through AI wonders about teenagers of the future.


FUTURE PASTS, PAST FUTURES is part of the exhibition RECOLLECTION. AI AND MEMORY presented by EXPANDED.ART in collaboration with The NFT Gallery at their galleries in New York and London, 11 April  13 May 2023.

19 artists explore the idea of further challenging the concreteness of human memorypersonal or collectivethrough creative collaboration with AI. 

Memories are nebulous. Scientific studies and phenomena such as "The Mandela Effect" have shown that humans rarely recall things in their unbiased exactitude. Artificial Intelligence already assists human memory in the form of predictive text and GPS navigation. One would surmise that there exists a role for AI when it comes to supplementing even more complex memory.

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