Tasmania flips AI back into place with tasman ai TasmanAI

Josh Foley

• Tourism Tasmania showcases the real creativity natural to the island state

With the use of AI image generators on the rise, Tourism Tasmania decided to flip the switch back to human creativity — by giving the sort of prompts used to whip up images on AI programs (like “create an Impressionist image of a cow singing opera”) to real artists instead.

With the art made over time, not with the click of a mouse, TasmanAi shows the world that instant isn’t always better. There is joy in slowing down, taking time to think and celebrating craftsmanship — all of which are intrinsic to the Tasmanian way of life and keenly felt by anyone visiting the island.

The genius behind the AI

Here is a flesh-and-blood Tasmanian artist who responded to prompts from the public with real artworks such as paintings, illustrations and drawings for the TasmanAi project.

JOSH FOLEY

Medium: Oil and acrylic

Josh Foley

Foley likes to play with viewers’ experiences of reality by playing around with the traditional styles of landscape and still life, in textured pieces that make you question their two dimensions. “This trompe l’oeil that I work with is not to deceive but to confuse the haptic expectations and bodily position of the audience,” explains Foley, whose work is collected both in Australia and overseas, including Tasmania’s cultural cathedral Mona.
Expected TasmanAi output:
To figure out how to upend his AI prompt.

On TasmanAi

It has given me an opportunity to explore the subject of AI more thoroughly. I enjoy the conceptual implications. I’m not concerned about this phenomena, as our own intelligence is also partially coded, algorithmic, artificial. We can understand ourselves further by observing this manufactured reflection of us, and how that manipulates and interacts with our digital universe.

What makes Tassie artists so unique?

Creativity, like scent, can be drowned out by too many competing ideas… aromas. One is able to distil the essence of their thought, most profoundly, in isolation.