Pandora's Garden is a series that explores photography and some existential questions in the emerging landscape of AI generated and assisted content.

What started as an experimental work testing the racial/stereotypical profiling of these AI databases back in the fall of 2022 evolved into several bodies of work that aim to question the perceived limits, regulations and legal authority in works that have been partially or entirely created by or in collaboration with AI.

Pandora's Garden specifically emerged from admiring the accuracy that Dall-E 2 (then Midjourney) could replicate when it came to botany (as opposed to humans or other life forms) and how much it could pass for lens-based stock imagery when juxtaposed with real images of flowers. From there I drew connections to my mother, and her love for botany/gardening throughout her entire life, makin gnote of the special connection to Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida and his refusal to show an image of his (then child) mother and sibling in a winter garden. In the same way, I too have refused to give up the very personal image of my mother to these technologies and preserve the humanity I hold of her in my memory and mind.

All of these elements, in combination with inspiration from Kehinde Wiley's epic baroque-esque colorful paintings and Stephanie Syjuco's purposeful implementation of Photoshop's default checkerboard background in her work to symbolically represent “missing information” led to these six 3x6 foot pieces.

With the series aiming not only to show the missing connections and limitations AI currently holds, but how to be more mindful with the future implementation of the technology. Specifically on how to evade AI's intrusiveness and question whether these technologies should make the next logical conclusion, have access to billions of personalized histories and stories. At the same time using Spanish and cultural markers to note that AI holds its own westernized biases and consider how that may impact cultural preservation, oral/taught traditions etc.

I firmly believe we are in a marathon, not a sprint, race with AI, and its long term implications should be carefully considered and explored now—before writing it off as a fad and realizing too late what we lost of our humanity in exchange.