AfterMichaelMandiberg (2024) is a series of works reimagining appropriation in contemporary art within the context of AI. The works appropriate AfterSherrieLevine, itself an act of appropriation by Michael Mandiberg, that digitised and put online copies of Sherrie Levine’s appropriation, rephotographed photographs from an exhibition catalogue of Walker Evans’ photographs of the Burroughs family, sharecroppers in 1930s Depression era Alabama in the US, and recreates them with AI.
While Levine’s act of appropriation employed mechanical reproduction, similar to that described by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, to produce one new copy of Evans photographs and Mandiberg’s act of appropriation employed digital reproduction, similar to that described by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, to allow an online audience to copy, paste and print endlessly Levine’s rephotographed photographs, AfterMichaelMandiberg creates new versions of Mandiberg’s copies. These new, or alternative, versions depict different people and slightly distinct scenes that have an uncanny similarity to Evans original photographs. In doing so the versions, in a sense fourth generation versions of Evans photographs, allude to the possible introduction of noise or feedback and changes that have occurred as a result. The introduction of noise, originally initiated by Mandiberg moving them from an artefact to information, ‘real’ to ‘virtual’, and now moved in AfterMichaelMandiberg from information to fiction, ‘virtual’ to possible, enables a reimagining of the history originally portrayed by Evans. As such, AfterMichaelMandiberg is all at once a comment on originality and authenticity of art in an era of AI; plagiarism of concept; copying, remixing and degradation of material; yet employs art’s long-established tradition of titling works as being ‘after’, in the style of, alongside ideas of versioning in software applied to the creation of art.
Similar to Mandiberg’s AfterSherrieLevine, online audiences are invited to copy, paste and print the series of AI photographs in AfterMichaelMandiberg, this time through the social media platform Pinterest known for its extensive use of AI generated and curated visual content. However, the code employed in the creation of the series of works is also provided online on Civitai.com , enabling an online audience to interactively generate their own versions of the photographs, thereby potentially creating endless versions and endless alternative histories.
