Essays – Conceptual Art by Todd Dobbs

Fake Plants, Real Prints

A cyanotype print with brush strokes at the edges of the frame and hand written titles and edition numbers underneath on smooth and warm watercolor paper. The image is a studio photograph of what appears to be a houseplant, however, the plant is not in a container and appears to be sitting in a pool of melting plant matter.

“Fake Plants, Real Prints” contains 12 handmade prints that are all limited to 1/1. This collaboration between myself and the Midjourney AI (Version 5.2) is a conceptual project exploring the authenticity, originality, and value of artworks that have human-created alterations to artificial intelligence image generations, or in this case, reproduction of those generations using a handmade process.

Artificial Intelligence, Language, and Trust

An essay addressing how artificial intelligence is altering our use and understanding of language and the need for photography to have a reliable way to authenticate images and prove they are made by a human instead of a machine.