Morgan Harper Nichols
Generations, Digital Mixed Media, 2023

"Generations" is a digital artwork consisting of alternating rows. The first row features five hand-painted pieces in acrylic and oil on paper. Directly below it, the second row displays art generated by an AI model trained on the paintings from the row above. This pattern continues, with each row of hand-painted art followed by a row of art created by the artist-trained data set. Digital warp tools were hand-painted to obscure lines between the rows. For the AI-generated rows, the artist used her computer and the Automatic1111 program with Stable Diffusion to create her own model, called a "checkpoint" named "fiveyears," representing the five-year span of her original paintings.

"Generations" is an inquiry into how creations produced at varying times and through divergent methods exist together under this idea of 'generations.' Boundaries intermittently blur, suggesting an interconnectedness. The artwork's row-by-row arrangement contemplates the roles of time, sequence, and spatiality in the formation of generational narratives. For the artist, a Black autistic woman, this warping of time and melding of digital and hand-crafted modes functions as an exploration of her own cognitive landscape, conversations with past, present, and future self, and an ongoing dialogue with the external world.