The Claire Silver AI Contest theme "WE" immediately brought to mind the show Pluribus and the fundamental tension between collective and individual identity. We live in a world of contradictions, forced to make daily choices that don't always align with our core values just to survive. Sometimes we shift those values entirely, causing seismic disruptions to our sense of self. Survival isn't about maintaining a fixed identity—it's about adaptation and becoming a shapeshifter. This doesn't mean abandoning principles to fit in, but rather stepping outside usual boundaries and withstanding discomfort without losing yourself to dissonance.
Understanding that we share a consciousness while individuality remains largely illusory helps us relate to others with more kindness. The battle between "we" and "I" has always raged: even as we move toward collective consciousness, individuality fights for independence. Though we have access to the entirety of human creativity, we sometimes choose a single perspective. We are whole pictures truncated into discrete bodies—an illusion of separation.
Like the character Carol in Pluribus, we mourn the death of individuality even while recognizing its limits. A single AI prompt generates countless variations, and my work transforms that multiplicity into something individual. Multiplicity doesn't collapse differences into uniformity; it holds many identities simultaneously. "We" is a continuous negotiation between all the "I"s contained within, yet even when composed of different individuals, the “We” moves as one collective.
The piece uses AI-generated figures (variations from a single prompt, with one variation for "Carol") and liquid textures, remixed together by hand in Photoshop. The "WE" in this process is the cumulation of human creativity within the AI tool; the "I" is the artist making conscious decisions about composition, treatment, and execution. I tried to keep some of the mistakes - we are full of them - and I kept the beauty.
Notes written by a human, and organized into coherent sentences by Claude AI.
