Artificial Reality: Astica and Roope Rainisto’s Distorted Visions of Vacation

In the age of burgeoning artificial intelligence and its intersection with contemporary art, Roope Rainisto's Vacation series emerges as a provocative examination of how technology augments our visual experience.  To better consider the complexities posed by Rainisto’s work, I initially engaged an AI tool capable of generating precise and detailed descriptions. What begins as a straightforward analysis of a photograph—a woman with freckles set against a picturesque pier—quickly unravels into a deeper dialogue about perception, reality, and the evolving interplay between human creativity and machine intelligence. Rainisto's deliberate distortions, meticulously crafted through AI, compel viewers to reconsider the boundaries of artifice and authenticity within the digital landscape.

Astica, a leading artificial intelligence company, specialises in computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. AsticaVision, in preview mode, includes facial recognition and object detection, and can be used to describe images; automatically tagging, categorising and moderating. Fed an image from Roope Rainisto’s Vacation series, the AI tool describes “a close-up photo of a woman with freckles on her face, standing in front of a beautiful pier.” AsticaVision elaborates, “The woman has a striking appearance with her unique freckles enhancing her features. The background features a serene view of a bridge stretching over calm waters”. AsticaVision zeroes in on the facial features of the central subject, describing a woman whose expression is “serene” and whose hair is styled “in a natural way”.   AsticaVision is not bothered and does not compute that this serene, uniquely-freckled woman has two noses, one pertly perched on top of another. A chat prompt allows me to ask a clarifying question of AsticaVision.

“No, the woman does not have two noses”, AsticaVision responds.

“The image shows a close-up of the woman's face, and what may appear to be a second nose is likely a shadow or a trick of the light. The woman has a single nose, which is a natural feature of her face.”

There is a hint of defensiveness in this strongly-worded denial. The AI continues:

“There is nothing strange about this image. It simply captures a woman with freckles on her face standing in front of a bridge. The scene is peaceful and serene, with no unusual elements present.”

But of course, this is not true. Roope Rainisto’s Vacation is full of unusual elements and unnatural features. Across an expansive 500 images and through deliberate distortions and glitches introduced by AI, Rainisto invites an interplay between reality and artifice. What first appears idyllic or serene – sunlit beaches, vibrant poolside scenes, a ‘beautiful pier’ – upon closer inspection is revealed as artful distortion. Figures are abstracted and faces are obscured; there are extraneous limbs and additional appendages.

Through the lens of artificial intelligence and post-photography techniques, Rainisto has something interesting and pointed to say about how we vacation; we might read into his repetition and accumulation, into the crowded constructed scenes, a comment on the inflationary tourist experience and the herd-like predictability of so much leisure activity. We might be moved to consider too the performative artifice of how we broadcast and share images of our own vacation time – social media replacing the picture postcard of old. ‘Vacations’ are a subject that provides broad and rich content for Rainisto. It overlaps with his earlier works REWORLD and Life in West America - paradise is both artificial and shaped by Americana – but Rainisto’s deeper inquiry is not into contemporary leisure habits but, more acutely, the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence.

Drawing from his background in technology and design, including co-founding a virtual reality company, Rainisto employs AI as a tool to dissemble. His approach embraces imperfections and anomalies inherent in AI-generated imagery, rejecting photorealism in favour of images in which the illusion of reality is deliberately shattered.

You can fundamentally use AI in two broad ways. You can use AI in a way that tries to hide the fact that it's AI, to create pictures where you can't tell if it is real or not.

I personally find it much more interesting to create something where it's easy to see that it's AI... You have more interesting discussions, at least in my mind, about why it isn’t real, or the conflict in your perception.

Rainisto, in this way, also challenges traditional notions of photography; his project underlines the fact that all images are constructed and subjective rather than objective reflections of reality.

It seemed an apt exercise to ‘feed’ Rainisto’s own image to an AI interface, inviting its interpretation and categorisation. This is the very mechanism employed by the artist, who describes the training and fine-tuning of an AI model:

I feed it my art. I feed it found art. I feed it the hard drives of pictures that I downloaded 20 years ago from websites that no longer exist … And you can actually feed it my past AI art, so you start to create these loops. You can actually train an AI with AI.

By accumulating, exposing and embracing the artifice of image making, Rainisto intentionally disrupts the viewer's expectations. Just as a vacation provides respite from routine and from what we nominally call ‘real life’, the artist invites us to contemplate the fantasy inherent in reality and the potential for escape.