IMAGINED WRECKAGE — [Digital Prototypes] by Chuck Anderson

IMAGINED WRECKAGE — [Digital Prototypes] is an ongoing experimental body of work by artist Chuck Anderson of NoPattern Studio that explores the creation of digital objects and sculptures utilizing various media, including AI, photography, drawing, and collage.
Since starting my studio in 2004, I have aimed to create work that is simultaneously surreal and believable, hard and soft, dark and light, vivid and bleak, complex yet composed. These new works, which began in September 2023 using only Photoshop's then-new Generative Fill tool, have evolved to incorporate a wide range of AI and digital software alongside hand composition, unexpectedly steering my creative practice towards a new path.

To my surprise, exploring physical materials in the digital world has inspired a parallel exploration of physical materials in the real world, leading me to create new works using epoxy resin, metal, airbrushing, and found objects—materials I had never considered relevant or coherent within my practice. To that end, I regard these on-screen pieces as "Digital Prototypes"; final pieces in one sense, yet precursors or sketches for eventual physical works to be created in the future.

The physical materials—marble, tempered glass, pressed flowers, wax, mylar, cellophane, aluminum, paint, plastic, acrylic, construction hardware, glue, fasteners, powder-coated steel, security mirrors, seam tape, motorcycles, engines, to name just a few—their interactions, and the way color and light impact each element as well as the whole, provide a seemingly infinite trove of resources from which to build these pieces of "imagined wreckage".

Imagemaking with AI tools is, for me, about casting wide nets filled with personal variables: my vocabulary, reference material, archives, and photography, then working towards becoming the most disciplined possible editor and steward of the output. What we then do with that output is where the real potential exists. Not only letting these exist as images on a screen but serving as a new kind of larger, holistic blueprint in one's creative practice.