Daniel Montoya art (Contributed)
The 15th Annual Student Photography Show will be showcased both in the front windows of the Corner Gallery and in the Art Center Ukiah space in the rear of the gallery for the month of May.
“It’s a significant anniversary,” says photography teacher Lech Slocinski. “Ukiah High School students have been consistently creating quality photographs for 15 years. That’s thousands of images presented to the public over the years.”
The work on display will be from Ukiah High School students taking either the introduction to photography class or the dual enrollment Mendocino College Art 140 class.
The title of this show, “AIn’t,” refers to the fact that all the work on display will be actual photography as opposed to Artificial Intelligence generated images. Lech elaborates, “The students have done class assignments on different subjects, and I’ll be selecting the best examples for the show. There is definitely some AI embedded in the Photoshop program that the students are learning to use in class. Photoshop has more and more AI assisted tools to make the work easier and faster… but in these classes we do not create images with AI. We are trying to stick to the traditional art of image making for this show.”
Continuing on the subject of AI, Lech says, “One year I’d like to do a separate class in AI. The AI generated images are not ‘shots’ but ‘creations,’ which pushes us to redefine what art is. We are witnessing the birth of a new art form and we must ask the questions ‘Is it art, or is it a very sophisticated collage? Where does the art start, and who is the artist?’ With the blending of the images in AI you cannot tell what the original art is, like you can in collage where it is obvious that the individual elements were cut out of magazines or photos made by another person. AI makes things complicated because we don’t know who the original creators are. We can’t even assume that they’re human.”
This question about what defines art has been pondered for centuries. Lech points out that in the early stages of photography, French art critic and poet Charles Baudelaire declared that photography was for would-be painters who were too lazy to learn how to paint… the thought was that cameras are mechanical devices that any untalented dabbler could use and therefore photography was art’s greatest enemy. In fact, over the years photography became an art form itself. And its physical foundations keep on changing and evolving. First, with the switch to digital processing…and now it’s AI.
Lech embraces the unanswerable questions about what makes something art. “Now you have to look at the levels of art,” he says. “Let’s say, you want to write a novel, you have a great story (aren’t there only seven basic plots?) but you are not a writer, so you prompt an AI program to take paragraphs from existing novels and blend them together to fit your new narrative. But is it creative or is it plagiarism, or both? That would be easy to spot…”
Lech continues, “What if you use a more sophisticated AI program? What if you write a novel using a collage of sentences from published books? Is that original or not? Is the blending of someone else’s sentences to create a new narrative original art… or is it stealing? Ultimately, the question becomes how “small” the discrete units need to be blended so the outcome is considered to be an original creation. At what level a new art form is born and stands on its own?… I think it’s the skill used to put things together, to reassemble reality, that is the art. You have to have a vision to do it, which comes from a creative place deep inside the individual artist.”
Lech is totally comfortable with the uncertainty over what’s real and what’s not. He says, “I can look at a photo and love it…with no idea whether a person or AI did it… and I wonder if that really matters. There are no answers yet. It’s evolving. I’m not for or against AI… I’m just curious.”
The AIn’t show is generously sponsored by Mendocino County Office of Education.
The First Friday opening reception for AIn’t will be on May 3 from 5-8 p.m. Live music will be provided throughout the evening by Sy Frey. Art Center Ukiah is located in the rear of the Corner Gallery at 201 S. State St.
