Bård Ionson, Vanishing of the Genuine: Bone Flag, 2024, AI video generated through Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) algorithms, utilizing a dataset of the artist’s analog film photographs of animal bones and flags, 4K resolution, looped, 00:50, Edition 1/1, minted on Ethereum
This work is from Bård Ionson’s series Bones: Vanishing Of The Genuine, which examines how reality shifts into hyperreal simulations, challenging our perception by asking: “How do we live in a world where reality seems to be vanishing?”
In Bone Flag, Ionson synthesizes Georgia O’Keeffe’s skeletal iconography – particularly her “Cow Skull: Red, White, and Blue” which she called “a new kind of American flag”, with Jean Baudrillard’s philosophy of simulation. Baudrillard’s framework, detailed in “Simulacra and Simulation,” maps how symbols progressively detach from reality until meaning itself becomes unstable as authenticity dissolves.
Using analog film photography, Ionson documents bones suspended against sky and American flags, capturing authentic film grain across 2,000 exposures. The bones consist of deer, springbok, beaver, and cow skulls and other parts of bones. These were supplemented with digitally-grained images, then enhanced and used to train a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Bård curated key waypoints in the models matrix to produce the film of a walk through the model as if exploring a simulation of this flag, bone, and sky in a hyperreal space. This is a place where the symbols become detached from their original context and meaning.
Bones: Vanishing Of The Genuine invites viewers to navigate the disorientation of contemporary AI reality by witnessing the transformation of the authentic into the hyperreal – represented through the evolving American icon of bone and flag. Bones is a series of photographs, AI films and photographed AI images.
Equipment used: Olympus Pen EE-3, Mini Diana, Nikon A8008, Kodak Gold film, iPhone 12, Dehancer film simulator, StyleGAN2, AfterEffects
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The rest of the Vanishing Of The Genuine art pieces are in two parts, motion and still images
Many of the works are now on public digital signs around the world with ArtCrush