anthony discenza

The Bathers series was commissioned by KADIST and Material for “Machine Yearning,” a symposium on generative AI and artistic practice organized as part of Feria Materia 10. For the duration of the fair, these images were displayed on digital billboards at several locations throughout Mexico City, where they were visible from the Periférico Highway .

Inspired in part by a fascination with the nightmarish crowd scenes of James Ensor, the Bathers series reflects my interest in the potential for new visual sensibilities to emerge from the errors, flaws, and failures of generative AI systems. The project attempts to complicate the rapid and unceasing refinement of generative image models—a trajectory of technological development that has arced increasingly towards stability, repeatability, and homogeneity of output—through an intentional skewing of these tools’ typical workflows. 

This suite of ultra-high resolution images was made by prompting an old version of Stable Diffusion, one of the main generative AI image models, to generate an initial composition of a crowded beach party. That initial output was then used to partially guide the generation of a new image, utilizing the same text prompt but a different iteration of the Stable Diffusion model. This process was repeated many times, allowing artifacts and errors to steadily build up within the image (with no attempt to purge these errors from the prompt) while allowing many different versions of the model to redirect the look of the image at each stage of generation.

By repeatedly feeding the output of the model back into itself, this iterative, noise-accumulating process re-stages in a distorted way the operations within the neural networks that comprise generative image models. The resulting images are chaotic and collage-like, transmuting the errors, artifacts, and distortions built up through repeated generations into a dense visual space that refutes the visual coherence and control generative model users typically strive toward. Although each differs somewhat in style from the others, in content and process the compositions comprising the Bathers series reflect the noise, chaos, excess, and exhaustion of our present moment, as viewed through the lens of an extractive visualization technology whose full implications have yet to come into focus.