Terra Forming is part of Omnia Ludens (Latin for “Everything in Play”), an ongoing series that transforms printer calibration images into prompts for AI image generation. Calibration charts were designed to regulate color, precision, and consistency across mechanical systems. By redirecting these functional images into generative models, the work shifts them from instruments of standardization into sites of speculation, where measurement gives way to invention and certainty dissolves into ambiguity.
The work explores images as evolving systems rather than fixed representations. It considers how contemporary AI inherits and recombines visual history, extending traditions of photographic appropriation into an era of machine learning. Rather than depicting a landscape, Terra Forming presents a terrain assembled through overlapping processes of calibration, computation, and interpretation, inviting viewers to consider how technical systems increasingly participate in the production of culture, memory, and vision.
Terra Forming is created through an iterative workflow that combines historical imaging artifacts, AI image generation, and digital composition. The process begins with printer calibration images, originally designed to measure and standardize photographic reproduction. These images are repurposed as visual prompts within multiple diffusion models, producing successive generations that reinterpret the source material rather than reproduce it.
The resulting outputs are evaluated, recombined, and developed through numerous rounds of generation and editing. Individual passages from different generations may be assembled into a single composition, with color, scale, and structure refined through digital post-production. Rather than functioning as an autonomous AI image, the work emerges through an ongoing dialogue between historical imaging systems, machine learning, and human judgment, where selection, composition, and editing remain central to the final form.
Travis LeRoy Southworth
Travis LeRoy Southworth is a conceptual artist working from the premise that every image is a system rather than a singular picture. He treats the operations that produce images, from retouching gestures to interface symbols and corrective language, as the medium itself. His work preserves correction, absence, and repair as evidence of touch, labor, and judgment. Highlights include the MoMI x Tezos FA2 Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship in Photography, exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zürich, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Southworth holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
