First Step Is The Hardest

Rainisto creates constantly, experimenting with new ideas and techniques. To produce a series such as Vacation, he begins by considering the emotional quality he wants to express and formulates a narrative he wants the series to communicate. He trains custom models, such as Stable Diffusion, to express this emotional and narrative quality. He then uses AI to produce thousands upon thousands of images which he then carefully curates and edits. The process is both highly technical and deeply intuitive.

Vacation foregrounds the use of AI in the creation of the image, its artificiality is showcased rather than concealed. Subsequently, Rainisto calls attention to the artificiality of photography itself. He explains, “In my mind photography has always been about the real and the unreal. Photos are not real. They're 2D pieces of paper. We have this cultural acceptance, shared norms to consider them real.” By blurring the boundaries between real and unreal: authentic and fake, Rainisto hopes that new technologies will foster scepticism and criticality, interrogating the idea of the photograph as an objective source of truth.