From Text-to-Clay
What can a ceramic practice teach us about working with AI, and what might AI, in turn, reveal about our own ways of making?
During a three-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC), I explored how the materiality of clay can offer a new perspective on the apparent immateriality of AI models. I approached both clay and AI through a material lens, seeing their inherent unpredictability as a form of collaboration rather than something to be controlled.
Using a self-trained AI model, built from emotionally annotated datasets of my earlier ceramic works, I prompted it with phrases such as "ceramic sadness." The model generated sculptures that seemed to exist but had never been made, forms that understood the aesthetics of clay but not its physical reality. These generated sculptures became provocations, asking whether clay could embody what the AI imagined.
The sculptures and images presented here document a circular dialogue from clay to data, to generated image, and back to clay, intentionally slowing the immediacy of AI through the patient temporality of ceramics; a negotiation between hand and algorithm.
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What can a ceramic practice teach us about working with AI, and what might AI, in turn, reveal about our own ways of making?
During a three-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC), I explored how the materiality of clay can offer a new perspective on the apparent immateriality of AI models. I approached both clay and AI through a material lens, seeing their inherent unpredictability as a form of collaboration rather than something to be controlled.
Using a self-trained AI model, built from emotionally annotated datasets of my earlier ceramic works, I prompted it with phrases such as "ceramic sadness." The model generated sculptures that seemed to exist but had never been made, forms that understood the aesthetics of clay but not its physical reality. These generated sculptures became provocations, asking whether clay could embody what the AI imagined.
The sculptures and images presented here document a circular dialogue from clay to data, to generated image, and back to clay, intentionally slowing the immediacy of AI through the patient temporality of ceramics; a negotiation between hand and algorithm.
Installation, Dutch Design Week, 2025
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