Interview.

As I began my creative career as a communication designer in the analogue age, the introduction of the computer into my creative process was a turning point and I quickly recognised the enormous potential of this new ‘colleague’. The transition from analogue to digital was just as controversial back then as the use of AI is today. I am always open to new technologies as soon as I discover creative potential in them that I can utilise for myself and my development. Having worked in teaching for many years, I inevitably have to deal with change. I first came into contact with AI long before the big hype. I am fascinated by the endless new possibilities that AI offers me when I play with it.

Maybe I am sometimes a bit too enthusiastic when it comes to this new technology, but I have kept my inner child that wants to explore curiously without asking questions.

So my experiences are rather positive, but sometimes I ask myself whether I can really approve of what I'm doing, because as a design lecturer I naturally also have a responsibility for future generations.

Nevertheless, my enthusiasm for the new creative impulses and possibilities that can now flow into my work prevails. AI and I have already become an inseparable artistic duo.

I quickly became fascinated by AI and followed its lead. Then came the moment when I wanted to lead the AI myself. I hadn't expected that my instructions would have to be so detailed in order to achieve a result that resembled or even matched my confused thoughts.

The mere fact that the AI always generates a selection of images in response to a prompt gave me the idea of confusing the AI. I call this ‘AI Dadaism’ and it's a lot of fun.

Unexpected thoughts came to me, however, when I was censored by the AI for the first time. Among other things, I wanted to test the AI to see how it deals with racism, gender, sexuality, religion or diversity - in other words, who fed it what and what is and isn't possible.

Apart from that, I love it when AI surprises me and breaks out of the mainstream. It often inspires me and gives me new ideas in my creative process of developing generative art.

Damn... I'm inspired by everything As I became more involved with AI and working with it, I asked myself how AI dealt with issues such as diversity, gender, homosexuality or racism. So I kept pushing the boundaries of what was possible with AI and trying to go beyond. I was surprised by many things, both positive and negative, but what outraged and annoyed me the most was the censorship. I can understand this controversial topic in many ways, but I still feel very restricted in my 'artistic' work. Especially when it is subject to double standards, as we know from some American companies in the social media sector. In the end, I found ways to get around the censorship in a very creative way. One of the things that inspired me was fashion photography, as I have been working in the fashion industry for many years and the creative possibilities of AI are perfect for that. All my life I have been inspired by the old paintings of the Italian Renaissance masters like Caravaggio & Co. I often see this influence in my work. This free piece is just one of a series of images I created this spring with the help of AI.

To be honest, I'm bored of just prompting to generate images. I'm rarely satisfied with the result as it's often far removed from my own style. That's why I almost exclusively use my own templates such as photos, drawings or collages and edit them in a long process using different AI tools in combination with prompts. For this picture series I used the following AI tools in the Pro version: Adobe Firefly, Mira Muse ai (Lux AI Models), Adobe Photoshop and Exactly.ai with my own trained AI models which I fed and trained with my artwork. I used my own photos taken by friends or model friends as a basis and used them as a template for the AI. The result is run through the AI tools mentioned above and the results are combined in Photoshop to create a collage, which then serves as a template again. I repeat this process until I'm happy with the result. I often keep AI errors in the images as this makes the result look surreal, as it was never my intention to tell photorealistic stories with the AI. I call it ‘ping pong’ with the artificial intelligence and feel that we are a good team that inspire each other. The exact process from the source to the result is still my secret. Unfortunately, I often get caught up in AI frenzy and forget to document the process, which is fatal if I want to develop a series.