"Artificial intelligence produces 'machine learning images' by analyzing existing images to 'digest and excrete' them in a new form.
There are two ways to create images with AI: first, via an image upload; second, via a text input, known as prompts. For me, the latter is the more exciting option because it requires you to imagine the image beforehand and then describe it verbally. If you use blocked words, you receive a warning. Both workflows produce four versions each. From here, there are two ways to proceed: I can use 'edit' to remove parts of the image I am unhappy with and have it recalculated into four versions with a modified prompt, or I can take a generated image that I like and let the AI improvise without prompting, resulting in four more variations.
In the summer of 2022, I was able to test DALL-E 2, currently the best AI for image generation with prompts, for three weeks as a beta tester. My goal was to use the AI to create images that were subsequently rejected for further processing by the AI itself because they violated the guidelines. When this happens, you receive a warning. I received about 50 warnings before my account was deleted.
I call my series of images VOMIT because the AI of DALL-E 2 generated them but refused to process them further and spat them out. Thus, the AI behaved like a human being confronting his own (Jungian) shadow. In C.G. Jung’s analytical psychology, the shadow is an unconscious aspect of the personality that does not conform to the ideal of the ego; it is the repressed blind spot of the psyche that causes the ego to resist and project the shadow."
– Boris Eldagsen, September 2022
In this special edition of VOMIT, Eldagsen gets mischievous: he took one of his AI-generated images and created a limited edition of 10 heliogravures. Yes, heliogravure—a process over 200 years old, known for creating prints with stunning, almost timeless depth. This edition of 10 is designed to outlast us all, a print that could still be around in centuries to come. The irony is delicious: a fleeting digital image is made permanent using a nearly ancient technique. Eldagsen is making a wry statement, taking tech’s flashiest invention and grounding it in an art form that may outlast our modern technology altogether.
He collaborated with the artist Hendrik Faure, one of the last few master printmakers in Europe who still knows this craft inside and out. Heliogravure, with its roots in the 19th century, is almost a lost art, practiced by only a handful of artisans who understand its complexity and require patience.
