Dreamscape
In reaction to AI-generated art based on BIG DATA, the Metacreation Lab developed Autolume, a no-coding environment that allows artists to train AI models based on their own selection of works, be it they theirs or otherwise. The tools allow non-experts to manipulate such models and generate both still and animated outputs.
In this first iteration, we worked with Vancouver-based visual artist Erica Lapadat Janzen. By manually searching the latent space abstracting the aesthetics of the work, using Autolume, we hand-picked and treated 12 stills and 9 video loops (we think of as slowly moving paintings) to be presented publicly.
Erica Lapadat-Janzen is a Vancouver-based new media artist, creative director, and researcher working across generative image systems, video, installation, performance, and networked media. Her practice examines identity, machine vision, memory, digital labor, and the psychological dimensions of life mediated through computational systems.
Drawing from glitch aesthetics, internet vernacular, archival fragmentation, and generative image production, her work explores the unstable boundary between human perception and algorithmic interpretation. She is interested in how contemporary technologies reshape intimacy, authorship, self-representation, and collective consciousness.
Her visual language often combines seduction and rupture: distorted figures, synthetic landscapes, recursive imagery, and degraded interfaces collapse distinctions between the organic and the artificial. Rather than presenting technology as neutral or inevitable, Lapadat-Janzen approaches digital systems as cultural and emotional infrastructures that both construct and destabilize contemporary subjectivity.
Her current research explores the aesthetics and politics of generative AI systems, with a focus on machine perception, synthetic image culture, and the feedback loop between datasets, platforms, and identity formation.
Alongside her artistic practice, she is the founder of Ministry of Next, an experimental creative lab focused on emerging futures, culture, and technology.