DALL.E_MBRYO

An expedition into the generative primordial abyss by Daisie Jacobs. In one sense the ‘lifeforms’ depicted in these images never lived - there was no fertilisation or conception; there are no bones or viscera; no blood and no arteries to carry it. They exist only as we perceive them here - uncanny and eternal, calcified in digital amniotic stasis. Free from pain and decay, and devoid of human potential. In another, each pair of glossy black eyes and each six fingered hand have lived, are living and will live hundreds of thousands of lives - the earliest images of which fed the algorithm that created Jacobs’ specimens. Her protracted investigation into what we consider authenticity to be in relation to the ‘photographic image’ has never shied away from documenting the unsightly and undesirable. The longer we look, the more we realise that truth is buried in the things we don’t want anyone to see. The work collected in this volume positions the artificially generated portrait as a signifier of the post-truth era - we’ve moved beyond Sontag’s assertion that the photograph is able to usurp reality; “not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real”. What we are looking at here in Jacobs’ work “is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint, or a death mask” - usurping the reality of the usurper.