/imagine Ronsack

Abstract

These digital hallucinations of history were created using photographs and generative AI. Models trained on the artist’s own rephotographic montages, and other relevant fragments of time, were asked to imagine an ancient oak tree in Shropshire, UK - a silent witness to vast changes since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The work was created in collaboration with Tom “Swansither” Kennedy, who wrote the music for the piece and devised the original concept for the work. The great tree lies on farmland where Kennedy lives, inspiring him to create soundscapes that evoke a haunting sense of deep time. He writes “I visit the tree often, and imagine it with ears and eyes, a witness to some 40 generations of humanity, the changing landscape, Civil war and, most importantly, the Industrial Revolution that began in Coalbrookdale, barely a stone's throw away, and changed the world forever.”

Coldwell conducts research into time, hauntology and AI. In this new kind of image generation, ghosts are summoned by artificial intelligence from countless photographic fragments, into a kind of spectral goo that Coldwell has recently dubbed “Vectoplasm” - after Barthes’ writing on the spectrality of the photograph. This new ghostly digital “substance” is comprised of many traces of a real past mixed together, but unlike traditional photography, completely reconfigures them into bizarre new forms. While these traces can no longer be used as reliable historical evidence in this formation, their digital deconstruction and reconstruction does allow us to visualise impossible perspectives on time, and encounter entirely new forms of haunting and decay.

Vectoplasm: Virtual / vector-based “ectoplasm” – from Barthes’ use of the word in photography theory. Vectoplasm is a digital miasma from which ghosts appear or are constructed. Vectoplasm is the raw material of generative AI. It consists of raw data, noise and a learning model of some kind, working together to generate new outputs from learned patterns, such as in denoising diffusion. Spectral photographic traces and information from the past are garbled and reformed into new simulacra out of vectoplasm. We only become aware of vectoplasm’s underlying spectrality when we encounter the uncanny, glitches, decay, or other unexplained phenomena in its outputs. Vectoplasm isn’t an ontological category or any easily identifiable part of a given generative system, but a hauntological symptom of the way such a system behaves as a whole.

Music courtesy of Swansither
Video created using original photography, Midjourney and RunwayML
An /imagineRephotography project