Endz Of The World - 2023-2025 - Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Welcome.
My work begins with an inquiry into the unseen. During the 20/20 residency, I embarked on a journey to uncover hidden histories, particularly the stories of empire workers who migrated to the Black Country. The local gallery’s 19th and 20th-century landscape paintings, including those by Edwin Butler Bayliss, Arthur Lockwood, and Harry N. Eccleston, offered a compelling, yet ultimately incomplete, narrative of the region's pivotal role in the Industrial Revolution. What, I wondered, was missing from these celebrated depictions?
This region's technological innovations once gave the British Empire a significant advantage in global extraction practices. This led me to a profound question: In our present era of rapid technological advancement, with the computer chip as the modern foundry, are we poised to repeat similar patterns of marginalisation? Could the digital "system," due to its inherent biases, inadvertently overlook certain realities as it absorbs and processes information?
To explore these pressing questions, I collaborated with software engineers, developing a unique database. This included scans from the gallery's permanent collection—now in the public domain—alongside ethically sourced images from my archives of mid-20th-century empire workers. Each image was meticulously tagged to train a bespoke machine learning model, which I then leased. This model became a tool for emergent intelligence, generating new visuals based on prompts rooted in my 20/20 residency research and local anecdotes I have long yearned to see manifest in image form.
The resulting artworks, timestamped Summer 2024, are the product of careful experimentation, an earnest attempt to bridge historical inquiry with contemporary technological exploration. This multi-faceted project, titled "Endz of the World," has led to a diverse range of creative outputs across various mediums. My process has been deeply informed by critical works such as Kathryn Yusoff's A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, historical scholarship, and contemporary cinema, engaging with pressing themes like those explored in AI-2027 and How LLMs work - Karpathy
What is 20/20
20/20 is an ambitious 3-year programme announced by the Decolonising Arts Institute in November 2021, with funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England and UAL.
Combining artist residencies with artistic commissioning at scale, 20/20 is bringing together 20 emerging or mid-career artists of colour and 20 UK public art collections, leading to 20 new permanent acquisitions.
20/20 was launched in November 2021 by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, working in partnership with 20 UK public collections, museums and galleries, and supported by funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants Programme and UAL.
20/20 is a project of national significance that responds to the need to fundamentally reassess and address the often problematic, difficult and negative ways in which diverse audiences see themselves reflected in collections. This includes the display or neglect of objects in the collections, the processes and relations that underpin their acquisition, and related narratives of interpretation.
