Using AI to construct real and imagined scenes from her own life, Laurie Simmons’ Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up follows a shape-shifting cast of women through a series of vignettes - from domestic settings and indoor pools, to city centers and desolate open roads - with an eerie, dream-like quality.
Shaping the imagery with experimental prompts, Simmons created the animated work with the AI platforms DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, marking a new development in the artist’s methodology and decades-long practice of mining personal memories and media constructions of gender roles. The surreal scenes in Autofiction hold the essence of Simmons’ signature style and conceptual inquiries as she wields new creative tools to expand her work into the digital form.
"I was used to collaborating with toymakers, makeup artists, body painters, and Photoshop editors, as well as sourcing images from the Picture Library,” says Simmons. “In July 2022 I started using AI text-to-image models, which I began calling ‘My Collaborators’, as the images we made together fit so seamlessly into the continuum of all my work. I love the way this new work finds a space between painting, photography, drawing and sculpture.”
Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting & Looking Up was produced by Danielle Bartholomew. Still photography of installation in Times Square by Michael Hull.