ZMOV VAINC

ZMOV VAINC was forged in the fires of happenstance.

In the fall of 2021, by sheer chance, I met the one and only Jim Stewart, Curator and King of the kooky and brilliant Zymoglyphic Museum in Portland, Oregon. Jim ended up inviting me to join his artist residency program and to include my work in his annual residency showcase.

Around the same time, my dear friend started playing around with Midjourney, the generative AI program. AI image generation was still in its awkward infancy then. Midjourney's Discord server had just launched a few months prior, and users' prompts still resulted in psychedelic, dream-like renderings that lacked the polished, recognizable moorings to reality they have today.

My charge as a resident artist was to use Jim's museum as my muse. On a whim, I entered "Zymoglyphic Museum as Muse" into my friend's Midjourney account. One of the images it spit back depicts what appears to be two 'people' visiting an exhibit hall in a museum. The world they inhabit feels like a midcentury fever dream, both alien and familiar. I decided that I would use this image as the launch pad for my exhibit and build the rest of this imagined museum, complete with found specimens, labeled display cases, and data-rich informational signage.

It ended up taking me 9 months to build ZMOV VAINC. In that short time, AI image generation took over the world. It was not lost on me that I was using an AI image as a prompt to create my human-made art, the direct opposite scenario from what everyone was beginning to fear, a world in which AI generated content replaced art entirely. For me, the AI images inspired an entire world of physical pieces, 36 sculptures in all, 21 of which I included in my final exhibit.

A huge thank you to everyone who supported me in discovering / creating this world, especially Jim Stewart. This is, after all, entirely his fault.

There are immense, complex universes hidden just out of sight, in the flickering periphery of our daily lives.

I continue to see ZMOVs everywhere.

An exhibit catalog is available here