Stray Dog by Daido Moriyama, A Prized Attempt "The Machine Recalls a Canon" 2500 x 1833 px, .png 2022

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Special birthday edition for 0x3y3 <3

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For this little exercise in post-photography, I attempt to recreate iconic photographs using new artificial intelligence algorithms that generate images from text prompts, made possible thanks to advances in natural language processing models like GPT-3. This photograph was mediated through Midjourney's AI Bot on Discord and is entirely machine generated.

This series is dedicated to Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. In recreating the canon from digital scratch, we can consider the fragility of our collective memories, we can also reconsider the canon in and of itself. What deserves to be called forth back into existence and why?

Daido Moriyama is another artist that feels like an inevitability in a photography canon. He captured the post-ww2 vibes of urban Japan using his signature grainy, blurry, high-contrast black and white compositions. Daido's street photography compositions are like unstoppable freight trains, there's a kinetic turbulence that's unavoidable, the friction between the weary individual and a tireless metropolis drunk on capital and gasoline. Moriyama captured his iconic portrait of a Stray Dog in 1971 outside his hotel in Misawa, a small northern city occupied by a US Army base. Like so many street photography treasures, this was a seemingly random moment that sparked the public imagination. Finally, a redemption arc for the outsider, for the lowly stray ambling in the stark sunlight like a proud prehistoric beast. Moriyama understood the post-axis malaise in Japanese society better than almost anyone.

For Reference, Moriyama's "Stray Dog" in the MOMA Collection: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/52359

(Over the years, "Stray Dog" has been printed facing both the left and right. For this exercise, I used a left-facing image as an inspo.)

May these links survive the tests of time <3

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// Artwork by Sabato Visconti // www.sabatobox.com // @sabatobox on Twitter //