In this time of social media doom and gloom, I think back fondly to the early days of the “fail whale,” a cutesy image of a whale being held up by birds when Twitter was down. We no longer see the whale even while we see many digital fails happening in public. But the fail whale served as an ongoing reminder that technology is built, technology evolves, and technology starts with sketches of ideas.
Monica Rizzolli’s Night Shoots is a PDF catalogue that shows a generative landscape coming together under a digital moon. While people often consume digital art in its final form, Night Shoots invites us into the process, with 100 works presenting variation upon variation. Many of us think of generative work as developed by artificial intelligence, but the more useful way to see works such as Rizzolli’s might be as augmented intelligence — a dance between human and machine.
Rizzolli’s work is part of Simulation Sketchbook: Works in Process, an ongoing online exhibition of 10 works at Feral File that opened October 20 (with a brief display at Vellum LA). The…