Jérémie Queyras & GPT-4:

Prompt: Draw a hot air balloon floating in the sky. (30 times) Time per iteration: 15 seconds.

Harmon-i (Human Artificial Reflection on Machine-Originated Neural Imagination) is a project which unites a human being and artificial intelligence (AI), who over several months work together in an attempt to find a consensus on how to make art. The human artist puts himself at the AI’s disposal to create artworks (making marks) in the physical world. Over several months of back and forth, the AI slowly turns the human into its creation machine, while the human sometimes willingly obeys and at other times refuses orders, at which point negotiations for agency and creative input unravel.

The final result consists of human drawings which are made of gold leaf on paper in response to prompts which were given by the artificial intelligence language model GPT-4, such as: “Draw a mountain lake with a dock. Draw it 20 times. You have 2 minutes per drawing.” The gold applied to the drawings serves as a filter, revealing the hidden human-AI creations, referencing gold’s transcendental quality in medieval paintings. Furthermore, gold is a conductor of energy, it is seen as a sacred material in many cultures and is simultaneously one of the key components of modern machines. Symbolically, this makes gold the ultimate material to bring forth the shapes which result from these collaborative reflections.