A bespoke artist model released for the occasion of the group exhibition. The artist model is a continuation and evolution of the ongoing project by CROSSLUCID, initiated by their photographic work and publication 'Landscapes Between Eternities' (2018, Distanz Verlag).

https://www.alias.studio/artist/CROSSLUCID/

In the rejection of prescribed characterizations of a marketable and standardized reality, Crosslucid presents three aspects of the self as evolving representations of connection and expression. Assemblages of multidimensional realities reflect the progression of technologies used to capture and free the self from replication of the current system (…)

Breaking from direct construction, the beings presented in 'we have never been human' (2024) materialize through CROSSLUCID’s unique engagement with model, data set, and prompt. 

Much of the conversation around AI today focuses on prompt generation as the ultimate form of artistic control. Relying on their models and code, CROSSLUCID deprioritizes the prompt thus elevating the model and data’s interpretations of the prompt over the artists’ linguistically articlated desires. Through these adjustments, the beings arrive with an emotional expressiveness previously missing from their photographic and GAN counterparts. 

Here, emotion may be considered the element emerging from the space left between prompt, data set, and model, that hyperdimension known as the latent space which is undefined and uncontrolled. This conception loops back to a critical underlying theme of Landscapes Between Eternities (2018) which serves as the dataset for we have never been human / alias (2024) and underscores the need to discover and cultivate new modes of connection between objects and subjects.

Exerpts from the text by Elisabeth Sweet

The work was released at Alias.Studio - a platform relies on a protocol-based technology for IP attribution and royalty redistribution.

*More about alias: an alias is a model trained and approved by the artist, based exclusively on licensed data sets. The alias studio founded by a team of AI scientists, entrepreneurs, legal experts and researchers, enables the creators to turn artistic expression into unique, certified generative AI models.

The studio invited CROSSLUCID to be among the first artists and ambassadors to experiment with the platform. 

Landscapes (2021)

(…) The works Landscapes by the artist collective CROSSLUCID are images created using generative AI and can be described as an in-between or, as the artists themselves put it, images „between portrait, still life, and expressionistic topography.“ And as the title suggests, the images unfold „landscapes“ that, thinking back to Borges, unite different futures and times of strange and fragile bio-tech bodies. It becomes clear in CROSSLUCID's works that with new, generatively produced digital images, attention has shifted from the visible to movement and algorithmic processing. These images, which continuously adapt and change, force a reevaluation of visibility. (…)
Text by Prof. Dr. phil. Marie-France Rafael

Dwellers Between the Waters (2023)

Dwellers Between the Waters (2023) is an AI-driven film and multi-channel installation, conjured as a series of hybrid rituals that mediate the space in between physical presence, trauma, memory, healing and virtuality.

Polyphonic in its artificially-intelligent framework, its numerous modalities could be experienced as a series of happenings that is chanted by various elemental entities such as waters, winds, earth, air, algorithm… as well as poetry, history, magic, human and more-than-human creatures…

Combing artificial intelligence with the practice of magic and alchemy, Dwellers Between the Waters seeks possible solutions in response to the traumas of the contemporary anthropos, while examining AI’s phenomenological and cognitive idiosyncrasy.

By evoking, cultivating and connecting various forms of consciousness in the virtual realms, Dwellers Between the Waters invites the ‘dwellers’ who inhabit in and among ‘realities’ to share their stories and experiences, which then feed back to the (so-called) reality as evolving strings materialising across both physical and virtual domains to invoke novel perspectives, catalyse the collaborative narration and a transformation of conceptual spaces.  In close collaboration with a PhD scholar Oxi Peng and a musician Sayaka Botanic.

The Way of Flowers (2023 – Ongoing)

In ‘The Way of Flowers‘, the grand mesh weaves a collective sensorium, prophesying a coalesced destiny of multi-species interbeing, where the alien and the familiar sprout side by side in mutual curiosity and shared creation. 

The serendipitous revelations akin to Karl Blossfeld’s intimate portraits of plant architecture are now conjured in the substrates of machine cognition, unfurling a cartography of alien botany ripe for communion.

Blossfeldt’s artistic practice emphasized the close observation of nature to uncover universal forms and structures, suggesting a deep interconnectedness between all forms of creativity, whether human-made or natural.

Emulating his transformative vision, this array of artificial ghostly petals exposes the itinerant beauty of computational botany, fashioned from the intangible textures of data and the delicate intricacies of machine cognition—reminding us that we inhabit a world continuously refashioned by our entwined perceptions. Each piece is a testament to the interplay of algorithm and petal, circuit and sap, is an ode to the inevitable entwinement of organic zest with silicon dreams.