Documentary Footage: Divine Recursions by Ellie Pritts

Documentary Footage: Divine Recursions2023

Forthcoming documentaryDimensions variable, landscape orientation

Divine Recursions are a series of self-portraits that encapsulate the artist’s ongoing relationship with self-portraiture. After experiencing reduced mobility in her hands due to a neurological condition, Pritts was unable to use techniques such as painting and drawing and began looking for alternative systems of creating visual art. In 2020, the artist embarked on her first digital self-portraits. The Divine Recursions series established what is now a recursive workflow that incorporates the artist’s photography, text prompts from personal journals, and AI learning models developed to generate images. Within each portrait, in-progress images are extracted and returned to AI in a repetitive rhythm that abstracts and stylizes each output. Applying this treatment to the artist’s own self-portraits illuminated unexpected characteristics that imbued her likeness with attributes of strength and courage. The accessibility of AI tools is an important component of Pritts’ practice—one she hopes can inspire others to create in new ways. Recursion is an intrinsic component of this series as it allows Pritts to expertly train her AI models and accommodate new features within rapidly developing AI technology. Elements from Divine Recursions are often revisited and transformed into new works. Pritts’ attention expanding technologies allow each work to act as an artifact of its time.

Artificial Intelligence, AI Documentation/Performance

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Documentary Footage: Divine Recursions by Ellie Pritts, 2023