Forbidden fruit is a name given to the fruit growing in the Garden of Eden which God commands mankind not to eat. In the biblical narrative, Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and are exiled from Eden.






This body of work uses computer generated photographs to challenge the notion of autonomous thought within the machines of the future.

One may believe that autonomous thought exists within OpenAI’s machine learning algorithm GP-2. This A.I. has been tasked and succeed in writing an entire new play. While this may seem like a success for the free thinking machines the reality requires a bit more inspection. To create this ‘new’ play the A.I. was required to scan and analyse millions of other dramatic works in order to produce it’s one original. What looked like free creative autonomous thought is merely a copy of human creativity. Within each example of an A.I. exhibiting ,what seems to be, true creativity there is always the caveat of the corpus of content it first needed to gather and train on to complete the feat. The machine is only able to act upon the information it is provided with, by the human/society who made it.

To demonstrate this often blurred line between free action and human coding within the machine, I examined the obscure notion of robot breath. We can see robot vision in self driving cars, we can feel robot touch while riding an escalator or wearing haptic feedback technology, but robot breath still alludes us? It seems that the breath is the last refuge for the human that the machine cannot replicate. 

Through the lens of robot breath the images of this project flip the reality of autonomous action back and fourth between the miraculous and the coincidental. 




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Encounters with Robot Breath: Leisure