Gregory Chatonsky, “Autodestructivity”

RRose Editions, 2022

Edition of 200 copies
21 x 29.7 cm
92 pages
Color digital print on recycled paper

The images in Gregory Chatonsky’s Autodestructivity were generated with a text-to-image generation algorithm, DALL-E 2, from the Auto-Destructive Art Manifestos written by Gustav Metzger between 1959 and 1961. They were reworked by the artist and some fragments of texts were selected.

“The interiority began to wrap itself around itself. It was another destruction that deepened the hollow and revealed its history afterwards. The world was shared by images and they were now drifting one after the other into the latent space that contained all the past images and all the images to come. For this reason, they were strangely realistic. It was no longer a matter of choosing from the stock of images, of dismantling and reassembling them to play the blank. It was a question of writing what images of images could think of. The machines dreamed of what had we had been and of all that we could have been, of a promise that had not been kept”.