Photographs of British Algae - AI Impressions

Utilising one of the cutting-edge photographic technologies of the day, the English botanist and photographer, Anna Atkins, created the world's first photographic record of botanical specimens. Celebrated for its historic significance and captivating imagery, her self-published book of various seaweeds ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions’ (1843-1853), has gone on to inspire innumerable mimetic images. Inspired by her famous collection, this contemporary project uses commercially available artificial intelligence (AI) to reimagine the botanical specimens Atkins featured in her scientific studies, creating entirely new visual forms in the process. Working from a sample of the specimens Atkins originally photographed, Ames takes their Latin names and uses these as instructional 'prompts', which are then processed through a ‘text-to-image’ AI image generator. In a similar way to Atkins’ study, the specimens are individually labelled with their botanical names and brought together to create a brand-new visual archive. However, unlike Atkins’ natural forms, these new AI produced digital specimens are entirely artificial. Uploaded online to create a future machine learning feedback loop, this new collection of digital forms intentionally blurs the boundaries between the real and the artificial, highlighting the growing disconnect and tensions between the natural world and the simulated hyperreality that increasingly subsumes it.