Jane Prophet

‘How do our identities and perceptions of ourselves change when we see and hear AI-generated representations of ourselves?’ With this question in mind, Prophet made herbAIrium, an AI-generated documentary about her own practice, narrated by a digital twin trained on her selfies and voice recordings. The goal was to create realistic images of the 60-year-old artist in her studio and local surroundings, but the AI kept producing a character with traits she did not share, and most sequences were not recognisable as self-portraits. Some, however, came ‘close enough to feel uncanny.’ The narration offers a self-reflexive account of the process, as the artist uses an image generator and, along the way, meets her AI ‘twin.’ The botanical imagery comes from an AI style trained on her own scanned 35mm slides of tiny plant specimens arranged into small compositions. The title plays on the herbarium, a collection of preserved plants, with ‘AI’ at its centre. Playful and critical, the work examines the biases and categories built into AI image systems, and how they reinforce or disrupt ideas of plant heritage, gender and ageing.