Ghost Codex

An ongoing series of collages incorporating various combinations of very early work (age 4 & 5), generative AI, poetry, fiction, drawing, scribbling, papers, fabric, etc. Each image 30” x 22”, mounted on watercolor paper.

Several things going on here. The images I made over 55 years ago are in dialogue with those recently cooked up in AI. The drawings were done at a time I was learning how to write, when letters and numbers were evolving from the abstract to the representational. I see a parallel with the denoising process in generative AI where random data is made coherent. Not that I recall of course but I assume there must have been a feeling of unbridled, matter-of-fact exuberance while making those hundreds of drawings before and during kindergarten while immersed in a state of proto-art (that is, before the concept of capital A “Art,” with all its baggage, had yet to manifest). Dipping my toe into Midjourney and ComfyUI evokes a similar sense of exploration and surprise via free-wheeling manipulation, only with a keyboard instead of crayons.

My ongoing preoccupation with memory, time, and hauntings (ghosts and haunted houses = metaphors for remembrance) is at play. As I tend to do, vintage ephemera are sprinkled throughout, creating their own ghost residue. Scraps of poetry or fables I’d written long ago but had landed on the cutting room floor are reconstituted anew. Occasionally I dip into chatgpt, asking it to remix my writings which I then continue to mash. Sometimes I ask the bot to spit out absurdist theorems summarizing these narratives. (Generative AI, textual and visual, is a supremely collagist enterprise—the making of meaning reminiscent ofsampling, remixing, and mashing but on an unprecedented scale, & rife with hallucinations and cursed images which, for me, are what makes it interesting..)

As with previous work, I glue artifacts from my own personal life experience into the compositions—torn bits of my worn-out clothes, x-rays, zippers, belts, and my old photos taken over the years, using them as is or blending them digitally. (For ex. the eerie face in “Boooo” below is a blending of a CT scan I had years back, blended with some creepy Rorschachs I’d made in Midjourney. The image, along with an old drawing I’d done of a headless man, led to the bit of text.)

Ultimately each image might be considered a diagrammatic plate in a large, never ending codex, each image implying cross-referential vectors zig-zagging here and there, “across time.” Connecting and reconstituting visual/textual information into maps intended not to lead to any closure or exit but rather amplify the making of paths within the haunted forest of one’s thinking.

These images continue my shift away from the earlier densely packed “full bleed” collages, towards the quasi-diagrammatic compositions found in more recent series.

(To view, scroll through images as usual. To read the text in a particular work, click directly on the image.)