Ghost Codex

An ongoing series of collages incorporating various combinations of my early work (age 4 & 5), generative AI, vintage ephemera, poetry, fiction, drawing, scribbling. Each image 30” x 22”, on 300 lb 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 is sprinkled throughout, creating its own ghost residue. At times 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. At times I ask the bot to spit out absurdist theorems summarizing those narratives. (Generative AI, textual and visual, is a supremely collagist enterprise—the making of meaning via something sort of but not exactly like sampling, remixing, and mashing on an unprecedented scale, and rife with hallucinations and cursed images which, for me, are what makes it all worthwhile..)

I continue to glue artifacts from my own personal life experience into the compositions—torn scraps of my old worn-out clothes, x-rays, etc. I’m also gathering old photographs I’ve taken or gathered over the decades, using them as is or blending them digitally first. (For ex. the eerie face in “Boooo” below is a blending of a CT scan I had some years back, blended with some creepy Rorschach’s I’d made in Midjourney. The image, along with an old drawing I’d done of a headless man, led to the bit of flash fiction.)

In contrast to the digital I am also beginning to do more here with the immediacy of hand-written text, which reflects a growing interest in personal calligraphy (although this is more on display in recent paintings, such as the last on display in this series).

Ultimately each image might be considered a diagrammatic plate in a large, unending 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.)