Artists statement

Human Archetypes, The Uncanny Valley, and Inorganic Human Forms

The work interrogates the recurring concept of humankind’s fascination with replicating herself in her own image. Just as the Judeo-Christian God is said to have created humans in his own image, we replicate ourselves in art and then science. We seek to make an artificial intelligence that may well be fraught with our own survival as a species, and we refine these creations until we can no longer tell if they are human or facsimilie.

Even when this is impractical; when a non-human robotic form may well be better suited to the task, we persist in making our new companions in human form. So much so that when our creations develop their own ability to create human forms, they inherently seek perfection of human characteristic when no such thing exists, and all humans are flawed.

My work takes the human and reverses this process, seeking to see how dehumanising one can make the subject of portraiture before it becomes ‘the other’. In doing so, I look for what makes us human, and how we portray or present various aspects of humanity and human endeavour as stereotypical archetypes.

I have used, as a paying subscriber, the artificial intelligence presented in the Adobe Creative Suite, which is ethically sourced from Adobe’s own stock collection which itself has been purchased from artists, as a launchpad for this exploration, thus invoking concepts of meta - where the AI works on a project that attempts to dissect the very reasons and underlying foundations of humankind’s desire to create AI in the first place.

Some of the work touches on the idea of a human/AI connection, extending to the concepts of an interspecies symbiosis, and whether a human could experience a genuine love of a non-organic human form, and vice versa.

Historical information

Clayton KEEFE

Completed a Bachelor of Visual Art at Federation University Arts Academy in 2023.

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