Final Statement: Project 1, (no subject)

The female sitter, the farm animal, and the bird are some of the most popular subjects of 19th c. painting. In one form or another, these remain the most popular subjects of the digital age. In these images, I entered into dialogue with such traditional portraiture alongside AI-generated images & text by auto-captioning works by Courbet and other painters and entering the results into MidJourney's AI image generation, alongside his and other painters' names. I then glitched these images with a variety of pixel-sorting and .txt editor software to indicate a more precarious relationship to feminity, nature, and the mediated viewer-subject relationship than has tended to be investigated. The degrading of each work I see as a representation of not only natural decay, but a reevaluation of the relation between subjects in nature and what looking at such media involving these subjects might mean today. All the same, could the deep transformation of nature (in part via the digital) allow for a reconsideration of human exceptionalism? Or a reevaluation of the priviliged position of human subjectivity? Or of merely human-made art itself?