Make Me a Landscape, Do Not Include Any Sky, by Ben Bloch

Gallery Talk & Art Exhibit Reception

Opening reception for "Make Me a Landscape, Do Not Include Any Sky," by Ben Bloch. A gallery talk with the artist will precede the reception from 3:30–4pm. Exhibit runs from March 14–April 24.

Artist Talk: 3:30–4pm,  Level 4 Gallery

Reception: 4–5:30pm,  Level 4 Gallery

Artist's Statement

Make Me a Landscape, Do Not Include Any Sky explores the relationship between art, nature, and technology in the emerging age of artificial intelligence. In collaboration with fellow artist (and tech entrepreneur) John Brownell, I used a collection of my paintings to train a closed-circuit AI image model focused solely on generating “Ben Bloch” style images. The images are brought about from text prompts. So I could write, “A lush forest, fall colors, green waters, do not include any sky,” and get a striking result. It was like seeing a clone of myself or hearing someone speak to me in my own voice. This new AI “assistant” could deliver completely original—and in a certain sense, unreal—scenes that mirrored my own signatures: high-velocity paint strokes, ghosty charcoal lines, and spots of raw canvas sprinkled throughout a composition. Still, these images tend to miss some of the tension—and magic—that the material of paint brings to canvas.

In some sense, all landscapes are based on prompts (be they nature itself, or a representation/memory of nature), and I wondered, what might these images, based on a custom visual language model, have to offer to a landscape painter? What would happen if I reversed the feedback loop and re-rendered them in paint on canvas? What could AI—which is, after all, a human creation—have to tell us about our human designs?

This series is borne of those questions. Artificial intelligence has wrought many anxieties, yet I think we mostly now agree that some form of it is with us to stay, and really only just getting started. New and ever more AI-tinged experiences are daily creeping into our lives: communications, self-driving cars, VR headsets, voice, video, and song generators, shopping assistants, and even virtual “soulmates” are all things that now have a foothold in our world. It’s as if we are watching the Internet (which is still in its infancy) become a walking child: absorbing, responding, and amassing at a rate so astonishing and overwhelming that it can leave us in disbelief.

These paintings are not, however, a mere product of AI. They are my personal creations, and perhaps doubly so: a mise-en-abyme of my experiences with nature, art, and the will to create. Hopefully, others will receive them as something both familiar and newly strange, and perhaps something compelling, even artful.

Artist's Bio

Ben Bloch is an artist living and working between Utah and Montana. He earned MFAs in Painting and Creative Writing from the University of Montana in 2002. Before deciding to focus on landscape painting, he was a co-founder of the arts collaborative Goatsilk, and he built and ran an experimental art space by the same name in Missoula from 2002-2004. During these years, he also wrote an arts and culture column for the Missoulian newspaper. Before moving to Salt Lake City in 2015, he was a visiting professor in new genre arts at Whitman College and a resident artist at Central Michigan University. Along his journey, he has also worked as a carpenter, an inventor and entrepreneur, co-created the web series “Killin’ It with Paul Crik,” and been a technical writer for a software company. He has received an NEA grant as a National Parks artist-in-residence, and his work has been featured in the UK Guardian, Hyperallergic.com, Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art, Public Art Dialogue, and G4TV's Attack of the Show.

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