AI Face Paint is designed to bring the lofty goals of artificial intelligence down to the earthbound intimacy of the country fair. First performed while I was in residence at UVA’s Mountain Lake Biological Station in southwest Virginia in 2023, the piece uses AI-generated images of synthetic children as design samples (aka “flash”) that local kids could choose to have painted on their faces.

The intimacy of the activity allowed for one-on-one conversations with parents about potential impacts of AI on their children’s future. The “flash” images are accompanied by a text that reads:

AI Face Paint is a project that taps into the power of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to imagine the possible futures we are shaping for our children. Both the faces and the face paint designs captured in these images do not exist in reality, but are instead the output of an algorithm based on a “large language model” created from data culled from the internet. They were made with the OpenAI Dall-E2 image generation platform by using natural-language prompts, such as “a happy seven-year old boy with nature-themed face paint at an American county fair.” They are as quirky, funny, and strange as one might expect of a technology in its infancy. Soon, AI algorithms will improve to the point of being indistinguishable from the real thing, and the uncanniness of such images will be lost.

Perhaps now more than ever, the possible futures that we leave for our children are being shaped by decisions made in the present. Generative artificial intelligence promises to change how we create, share and receive information, altering our very concept of what is real. Its impact on our culture will develop hand in hand with our reckoning with the climate crisis, which itself is a challenge to the idea of nature as a fixed, recognizable idea. As an artist, and as the parent of a (very real) 7-year old, I see these issues as being intertwined. How does one safeguard future generations against such new realities?

I look for optimism in the joy of face paint. It is a simple pleasure, a rare moment when our children have a moment of self-determination.

We have work to do. Today, let’s let the kids play.

This project is accompanied by a series of monoprints of made with inkjet prints of the flash images that are dusted with iron oxide through foliage collected on-site.