Photodynamic Art Generator V2 (2022)

Photo & Video Credit: Empty Cup Media

Photodynamic Art Generator V2 is a world that is constructed with capitalist values. The entities live in a competitive environment and have pressure to be the best over everyone else. The landscape in this world is an allegorical map of Creativity, with regions focused on the creative markets we work in, the emotional spaces we explore, how we find creativity, and the relationships we have with the things we make.

The entities are coded with diversity and individuality. The project shows how these ideas create a complex system that can generate diverse original drawings. The entities are coded with sophisticated attributes, like the characters we create in role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. These attributes allow the entities a chance to refuse all coded instructions depending on their character, life experience, and where they choose to go on the map.

The drawings generated by the entities show the emotional narratives of what they are experiencing in their world so the audience can see the general feelings on how capitalist values affect their experience. Because of their diversity and individuality and the code ignores life fulfillment in its criteria for who wins the right to make a drawing, we can see drawings mostly expressing feelings of unfulfillment.

This work shows many issues in how capitalism effects the entities mental health in a visualization of their psychological state. Often the entities are shown to be in areas of negative mental health being stuck in abusive and apathetic attitudes. The work explores at what moments the entities discover change and transformation. Thus, the project offers ideas on what values and needs produce more mentally healthy individuals. The project shows our current values are unhealthy, but because of the diversity and individuality, we can see some entities in healthy mental spaces and can get quantifiable evidence how they got there.