Text Prompt: A General History of Quadrupeds I-VI is a series of prints created between 2023 and 2024. I heard about AI-art generators at the end of 2022 and started playing around with them. Putting aside legitimate concerns about copyright, job security and the environment, I wanted to investigate how they could be used as a tool by artists. I quickly discovered imperfections that I wanted to explore.
Inputting the title of Thomas Bewick’s groundbreaking work A General History of Quadrupeds into a text-to-image generator, the outputs looked familiar yet were often anatomically impossible and rarely with four legs. Taking inspiration from these low res, grainy images, I engraved these “quadrupeds”, highlighting the limitations of AI-art generators. The technology is advancing so rapidly that only a couple of years later, these prints stand as a document of that period.
I chose Bewick as he was a visionary, regarded as the Attenborough of his era. He was an advocate for animal rights and protecting the environment. Bewick was also an experimenter, he took metal engraving tools to hard, endgrain wood for the first time, inventing modern wood engraving. His two volume book, A General History of Quadrupeds set out to illustrate all known four-legged animals. Several, such as the “Cameleopard” and the “Sand Bear” were imagined from written descriptions, an example of text to image generation.
These prints are a warning of the precarious state of the natural world. Should we fail to protect the habitat of animals, countless more species could be lost and we might once again find ourselves resorting to our imaginations to visualise these creatures.
Text Prompt: A General History of Quadrupeds I-VI (2023-24) Wood engraving, 120 x 120mm
A set of prints is in the public collection at the University of Warwick
