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AI-powered art installation 'Phase Shift' shows nature from ‘a different perspective’
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By Logan Royce Beitmen
On Friday, Dec. 5, an immersive art installation mixing traditional painting and photography with digital animations, artificial intelligence, music and augmented reality will open at The Lab at StarDust, an artist-run exhibition and event space in Albuquerque that opened earlier this year.
The exhibition, “Phase Shift,” represents a collaboration between contemporary Southwestern landscape artist Jess Merritt and digital media artist John-Mark Collins, who goes by the name of Ghost Orchestra.
“We call this space The Lab, and the space adjacent to it was my original studio space. We call that StarDust,” Collins said. “I had (video) pieces that I wanted to test with a live audience, and six months after I started that, we were doing all kinds of art events … and it just gradually became this experimental art space for everything from music to visual art. I really just want it to be a community beacon.”
Collins and Merritt began collaborating this past summer on a project for Downtown Albuquerque’s Wavetrails festival in October, for which they transformed Merritt’s mixed-media “Desert Rorschach” pieces into digital animations.
“I start with Polaroids of a landscape that I’ve taken while hiking. I scan them into a computer and mirror them, Rorschach-like, then print them out on watercolor paper. Then, I hand it off to a very analog process. I paint with watercolor on top of the Rorschach-like image,” Merritt said. “That’s where John-Mark (Collins) steps in. I scan them back into the computer and hand them over to him.”
Merritt’s works were inspired by the inkblot tests of early 20th century psychologist Hermann Rorschach. Collins compares his role in pulling out latent images from Merritt’s work as akin to discovering hidden meanings in a Rorschach test.
“Her Rorschach-style pieces lean into the idea that there’s something else below them, something else that they’re hinting at,” Collins said. “And we wanted to find a way to have them explode beyond the literal confines of a physical piece and bring them into another kind of reality, an alternate reality … The digital unlocks this thing you didn’t know was there.”
For “Phase Shift,” the front room of The Lab will display a series of augmented reality pieces. Merritt’s original works on paper, installed on the walls, will be transformed by Collins’ animations, which he will project onto them. Then, in The Lab’s main room, a much larger video projection will display a constantly changing landscape, based on Merritt’s work but powered by AI engines that Collins built. That piece is designed to be responsive both to the music of a live DJ and to the movements of people in the room.
“It is taking her initial work and my animations and then remixing it live based on input from the room,” Collins said. “So, it always changes. It never repeats.”
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Viewers may see rocks and mesas morph into reptiles and galaxies. Rather than disconnecting people from nature, Merritt believes technological experiments like “Phase Shift” help people “see the landscape from a different perspective.”
Collins agrees, calling AI a “powerful tool to explore the unknown.”
“It should feel organic,” Collins said. “It should feel like a moment in time, a memory that’s there for a second and then gone.”
