For many years now my work has been concerned with painting in the age of artificial intelligence. An age in which our visual understanding and appreciation are continually being upgraded, as technological advancements evolve.
The ABC paintings are a witness to their coming into being – a process, at once slick and crude, with elements of the works breaking down both, compositionally and in their very materiality – once-luscious oil paint is cracked, dried and exhausted, arid patches vie with free flowing organic rivers of paint, watched over by morphing, pathologising, and destructive elements. The colours, while less kaleidoscopic than in previous works, are still vibrant and acidic playing with opacity, layering and translucence. Each piece has the same compositional elements, but the order of the application of those elements varies resulting in quite different outcomes.
The title comes from the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. This algorithm is a swarm-based optimisation technique that simulates the foraging behaviours of honeybees and is used to solve continuous optimisation problems. The algorithm, however, has several drawbacks, such as difficulty solving discrete optimisation problems and is susceptible to numerical noise. So many of the algorithms that are beginning to govern our daily lives, are trained by our culture, and are learning to automate historical bias. AI perpetuates a feedback loop that can degrade the abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human at a time when the world is coming to terms with historical, racial and gender injustices.