Once, Australia was home to several species of dwarf emus. The last dwarf emu died 1822 in France, two decades after the rest of its kin were hunted to extinction back home by colonial settlers. This book uses cut-paper collage and AI-generated images to visualise the endling dwarf emus in Empress Joesphine’s garden in France.
My initial collage experiments played with ways to visually communicate the fragmentation of a historical record made up of scattered remains and misinformation. But these images felt flat, they were missing the uncanniness of the story. I wondered what emerging AI text-to-image models might produce in response to prompts about imagining the last days of a now extinct bird; how might a nonhuman entity imagine the tragic fate of these nonhuman creatures? I anticipated that it would be weird. But not this weird.
This book is a documentation of my experimentation with Dalle.2. Others refer to this process as a ‘collaboration’, but it is not. A collaboration requires a two-way conversation. The AI tool is a service provider, which I have used within a human-driven creative process. What you, the reader, make of the experiments, is a new creative process.
This book was created as part of the Blurb Ambassador Program, 2023. It is available to order: https://au.blurb.com/b/11816235-me-versus-dall-e