In the event of an apocalypse, what lovable creatures will inherit this world of iron and smoke from us? And who will remain to know each of these by name?
Today I had the pleasure of collecting "Kai" by Anne Spalter, part of the RABBIT TAKEOVER series. Across the series, we see digital paintings of rabbits among the rubble of a post-apocalyptic world. Not unlike today's text-to-image AI art generators, the rabbit is a particularly prolific reproducer. Reading the description of the series, we learn that the artist's pet rabbit Pickles sadly passed away in the development of this work. Proof of the artist's heart is in the way each artwork is lovingly titled with the name of each rabbit depicted. Not only is each artwork given a unique name, but each seems to be derived from a unique style. This is a very diverse swath of AI outputs. Looking across the series, I'm hard pressed to find styles that directly mirror one another identically. Especially in the face of being created using AI technology, there's something touching about each artwork being unique in these ways; an artwork like an animal which has been bred, and is deserving of love and attention, just as a pet is.
I chose to collect "Kai" for several reasons. First, the picture features a swirling Milky Way behind the silhouettes of windmills and chimneys. A waning crescent moon hangs high in the sky. Anne Spalter and I meet as fellow digital artists and also mutual collectors of one another's work. What better work from RABBIT TAKEOVER to collect in order to create a beautiful rhyme to my own work, Gazers, which Anne has collected.
The image in "Kai" of these silhouetted windmills recalls for me an exceptional moment in my life, over a decade ago. I was driving back to Seattle after spending a long, hot day tasting wine in Yakima vineyards. It must have been 2AM as I drove past rolling hills dotted with windmills. Far from city lights, the landscape was pitch black. The land was so black, in fact, that the sky was cast in a mesmerizing shade of blue that I believed was only visible as blue because everything else was so damned black. Otherwise, I'd have simply read the sky as black, not blue. There was something about how the way the propellers of the windmills slowly rotated; these wide black wings, swinging against a decipherably different black sky. In an instant, the beauty of that stretch of road collapsed upon me, pressing my mind like a flower in a book. I revisit those moments from time to time. Some years later, as I was early in teaching myself Processing, I recreated with code this scene I saw years earlier, forever joining that memory with my love of generative art; a genre for which the Spalters have been champions of.
So it is, "Kai" became a perfect artwork to add to my collection. Not only is this work joined to personal meaning in the present, but also to memories it conjures from my past, all the while honoring connections and friendships which journey into the future. In this spirit, I now Etch these words and thank Anne for creating this series which gave me much to think about and reflect upon. In the event of an apocalypse, what lovable creatures will inherit this world of iron and smoke from us? And who will remain to know each of these by name?
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