Scott Michael Eaton (b. 1973, Washington, USA) is a multi-disciplinary artist currently exploring the boundaries of representation using machine learning (AI) combined with traditional mediums - photography, print, animation and sculpture. Within this expansive scope, his work strives to examine the human condition and our increasingly complex relationship with our technology. His work has been featured in Wired Magazine, GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and has been shown and collected internationally. Prior to the RCA, he studied at engineering Princeton University and media arts and science at MIT.
Scott Michael Eaton
Perpetual Now, excerpt
A solitary figure endlessly interacting with its reflection. Bespoke data feeding multiple machine learning models.
Medium:
videoSize:
6:40 (looping), 4k, vertical
Medium:
Laser-fused polyacrimideSize:
38 x 38x 36 cm
None of these images are real.
Every pixel was made by AI. I am responsible for eliciting the images by feeding the AI text prompts and then curating the resulting images, but the fidelity and realism of each image is a direct result of the AI having seen innumerable examples of each type of 'disaster' which it studied and learned from. Its imagination is informed by the repeated observation and reinformcement from real-world images, the things it learns best are the things it sees most frequently. In this respect the AI is our canary in the coal mine, and, unfortunately, it knows how to represent human and climate disaster far too well - it readily destroys, decays, floods and burns.
Medium:
C-type printSize:
each 95 x 255 cm
Fragments I & II
Fragment I (detail)
Fragment II (detail)
Medium:
archival print mounted on aluminiumSize:
75 x 150 cm
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...”
What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? Where does being ‘human’ end and being ‘digital’ start as we are confronted by an unrelenting increase in technology, computation, data, and AI? I am an artist working at the intersection of technology and representation.
My practice currently investigates the use of AI to mediate and extract representations from data. The work developed at the RCA investigates two viewpoints on AI – one hopeful and one pessimistic. The hopeful outlook attempts to develop a ‘craft’ approach to AI – artist collaborating with machine to create work that is enabled by AI, imagining and stretching the possibilities of making by discovering the unique affordances enabled by sophisticated machines trained on bespoke datasets.
The 'pessimistic' interrogates large AI models trained on internet-scale data - the incomprehensibly vast, un-curated datasets of images and text that are scraped from the far reaches of the internet. This data, when distilled down by an AI model, gives a candid view of the state of our society - both good and bad - as it has been learned from the very fabric of the internet. I attempt to probe the representations learned by the latest 'text-to-image' models through laborious experimentation to discover the deep societal and cultural concerns embedded in them.