Elena Bajo, Buried in Your Petals (Datura Dreams)#5

The Madrid- and New York-based artist Elena Bajo uses generative AI to create her work Words Buried in Your Petals (Datura Dreams). These uncomfortably beautiful textiles are woven with a Jacquard loom—an early algorithmic method of weaving, invented in the nineteenth century, that Bajo has appropriated for these quasi-sculptures. Under the self-induced hallucinogenic effects of the indigenous plant Datura, Bajo first fabricates her work by hand, assembling abstract fragments of found textiles into preliminary works. These are then digitally photographed, and the data thus produced is fed into Google Deep Dream, which outputs them in a new form: as anamorphic, suspended, textile works that are composed of a multiplicity of multicolored whorls or eyes. This “software surrealism” is the result of the twenty-first century transmateriality (as Karan Barad has described that concept in her book Transmaterialities) of human, animal, and digital-machinic consciousness. Bajo’s work is a psychedelic experiment that poses the question: Can one induce a “trip” in a machine?