HalluClichénation (portmanteau of Hallucination & Cliché) interrogates the relationships between Generative AI hallucinations (i.e. “makes stuff up”) and the imagery it was trained on by generating a series of photos of famous (and oft-photographed) landscapes in N. America to explore slippages between the AI-encoded vs. actual landscape (such as improbable geography, feature repetitions, composite of different viewpoints/features etc.) which simultaneously reveal the AI-model’s “interpretation” of the landscape, as well as the photographic clichés of the landscape that the AI-model has internalized.

This is implicit in, and due to the nature of Generative AI – the AI-model first has to encode images and their associated labels into condensed mathematical representations; very similar images (such as photographic clichés) are more likely to be encoded into the model, which makes their representation more likely to be retrieved when later prompted. The composition of the generated landscapes reveal the consistency of photographic viewpoints (e.g. death valley is a more “recognizable” representation vs. yellowstone) as well as inaccuracies in image labels (e.g. Moraine Lake elements appear in generated Lake Louise images).

In order to achieve this, Stephen removes the supplementary models and processing steps needed to generate a “good” image (by modifying the base generated image), and instead takes only the baseline model trained on 2 billion images (100 TB) and issues simple short generic prompts (vs. highly detailed prompts specifying all desired elements) to generate the landscapes.

CREATED BY: Stephen Chen | COMPLETED: 06/16/2024

View the gallery of HalluClichénations below:

1792 1024 dissonance productions

dissonance productions

Started by trans-discplinary art-ivist Stephen Chen to consolidate his recent work; as well as facilitate collaboration with others. Stephen’s oeuvre is often allegorical as well as simultaneously deconstruct and hybridize the very forms he works in. Disdaining academic and esoteric expressions, as well as institutional conventions and practices, Stephen explores complex ideas and issues immanent in his works through experiments in form and technique.

dissonance productions