Walking as an art-research practice is well documented through the Western Modernist period, with a notable example outlined in Guy Debord's the Theory of The Dérive. The Dérive is “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” (Knabb, p.62) intended to place the walker in a heightened state of awareness.

This embodied practice reflects the Humanist importance placed on experience as a method for creative inspiration in the individual. In the contemporary paradigm where AI can generate representational imagery from analysed datasets of digital images, this relationship between experience, inspiration and creation is undermined.

A walk was undertaken by the lead researcher and photographed through a process of automation. The resulting images were used as a dataset for a Generative AI training model and new images generated as a result. Here the new images are presented in sequence in a video, in the order produced by AI. The format is reflective of the originals, captured on smartphone from a shirt pocket.

The model was able to generate a seemingly infinite number of new images mirroring aesthetic qualities of the originals. The resulting Digital Dérive displaces the human experience - and even the concept of the real world - from the generation of imagery. The images here are neither (intentionally) traditionally beautiful or contemporaneously illuminating to an experience. What they show is that AI can learn what a world looks like and repackage it to us. In this digital dream Artificial Intelligence can visualise drifting, and we can visualise an imagined city; a city no more or less real to the audience than one from a Human-made digital image.

References:
Knabb, Ken, ed. and trans. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006
      Debord, Guy. Theory of the Dérive. Internationale Situationniste #2, 1959