Me Vesus Dall.e: The uncanny story of the last dwarf emus was created as part of the Blurb Ambassador Program in 2023. Copies can be ordered via Blurb: au.blurb.com/b/11816235-me-versus-dall-e
Once, Australia was home to several species of dwarf emus. The last dwarf emu died 1822 in Paris, two decades after the rest of its kin were hunted to extinction back home. Did that last emu know it was the endling of its kind? Me Versus Dall.e explores this weird and unsettling story, through handmade collage and AI-generated imagery.
My initial paper 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 image generators might produce in response to prompts about imagining the last days of a long extinct bird; how might a nonhuman entity imagine the uncanny 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.