“I love dichotomy: the coexistence of contrasting elements. In this piece, the subject is myself. A mix of noble purity and messy humanity, of high-tech intellectual work and sentimental romanticism, of the traditional and the modern. The scene is imagined, an idealization of how I perceive myself and my environment — an exploration of AI’s capacity to represent not my physical appearance but my essence.

I crafted the base of the image over several days of iteration with text-prompted generative AI, tweaking and refining until the objects took shape as desired. I then took the image to Photoshop, blurred out some areas, and overlaid it with a coded generative image I had made previously. I aimed to make the piece clearly my style — despite being quite different in medium and process than my normal work.

When I was satisfied, and felt like the image was “me”, one of my kids saw it over my shoulder and asked “Where were you, when this picture was taken, Mama?”, and “Is that me in the background?”. Another one of my kids knowingly answered, “It’s Mama a long time ago.” I asked, “what clues made you know this is me?”, and they said, “well, your mug, your art on the computer, the gold bracelets, the henna, the headscarf that I am sure I have seen before... and your cheek. That’s me behind you, right?” I honestly didn’t know how to answer. Is it him? Is the woman me? Both yes and no, I suppose, at the same time.” 

 — Melissa Wiederrecht