One Horse Landed
One Horse Landed - Book & Poster Wraparound
21W x 26H cm
Offset-litho
40 pages printed on 120gsm Munken Lynx Rough
Saddle stitched with black wire
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Designed by Tom Joyes
Published by Nearest Truth Editions
£25
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Also available at Setanta Books
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Does AI present a world of endless possibility, or a dark and unavoidable end-time for art as we know it? In my new book One Horse Landed, collaboration between artist and machine is recontextualised as a vehicle for wonder, wit and surrealism – a tool with which to interrogate the boundaries of artistic expression.
The narrative thread in the work begins with horses, but quickly disentangles itself from the real world. Equine forms devolve, horse and rider metamorphosing into what might be alien lifeforms. A piebald pattern kaleidoscopes outwards. Fragments of parts from industrial machinery seem to rise up from the darkness, exposing broken cables and foam piled up in a surreal underground world. Slowly, this cast of unfamiliar figures becomes one with its new terrain.
Within this otherworldly landscape, the viewer finds themselves not only challenging their perception of familiar forms, but also delving into the realm of a speculative future. Human nature compels us to cling to the recognisable, and it is the tension that comes from this searching that spotlights my true subject: the complex choreography between the human imagination and machine interference.
“Foraging on the frontiers of 21st century synthetic creativity before the advent of today’s AI engines, Ben Millar Cole playfully delved into the orbit of Recurrent Neural Networks in search of new possibilities within photographic abstraction. Synthesising computer-generated images with his own photographic work, Computers Can’t Jump explodes with Millar Cole’s unrelenting creation and curation. Often comical and discordant, the photographs convey clashes in translation between human and machine, words and images. In its realised form, his concept-driven collection retunes the human gaze to reconsider the rules of photographic montage – a seeking, prompting and destroying of images into pixels to fuse and make anew” - Madeline Yale Preston