Lake Michigan Treasure Map

IMAGINED WRECKAGE is a project about amalgamation; my lifelong, somewhat childlike fascination with the question “What happens if I add this to that?”

The introduction of AI software was the first time I experienced how it felt to add my vocabulary to my artwork, technically speaking. The early results were crude and often quite funny, but the feeling of explaining, in my own words and with my own visual references, what I wanted to see and getting results in moments, was undeniably revelatory. The birth of a powerful, complicated, bizarre, and “very internet” creative tool. It genuinely reminded me of the first time I ever used Microsoft Paint in the 90's and tested out the Paint Bucket or Ctrl+Z, or my inaugural illegal download of a ripped copy of Photoshop 6 in 2000 to the family computer. A digital artist’s core memory.

Where artificial intelligence became truly powerful to me, however, was when I added the results into my existing practice, integrating them into methods and workflows that I knew well. AI outputs are best as a foundation rather than a result, something to be built on, molded, broken down, and rebuilt with specificity, leaving only so much to the machine.

IMAGINED WRECKAGE began entirely in Photoshop using the Generative Fill tool in October 2023. I had an idea for a simple sculpture of a slab of marble with a large screw driven through the middle of it. I built on this premise, made more involved studies, and brought them into Midjourney with added language, images, and references to found textures that would inform and further mutate these “digital prototypes,” as I’ve come to call them.

Finally, images are upscaled and each one color corrected and edited in Photoshop to add details, refine compositions, and remove unwanted AI artifacts. These works have led to surprising new experiments in my studio as well, energizing me to explore physical iterations using epoxy resin combined with inkjet prints, hardware, and flowers among other materials. Amalgamation. I’m a kid again.

With every piece I’ve continued to ask, “What happens when I add this to that?” Objects, forms, colors and textures coalescing into something wholly new is the goal. What happens when a layer of opalescent cellophane is draped over a black powder-coated motorcycle, what happens when metal spikes from a punk’s leather jacket is added to a panel of neon plexiglass, what happens when vines are added to an engine that’s been added to a logic board that’s been overlaid with a strange but delicate wire grid? Each answer I hope brings me and the viewer that revelatory feeling of a seminal creative experience.

Chuck Anderson