The image machine turns out an indeterminate cloud of images based on its experiences seeing more images than anyone but the image machine could ever see. From these experiences, the scale of which is incomprehensible, the image machine develops the ability to see subsequent and new images from discrete noise patterns along with whatever is on its mind. To the people observing the image machine, who wait with anticipation as if for a miracle, the images it produces feel as though they are pulled from a continuous unceasing stream of images. Like a fish caught from a man-made lake, the images produced by the image machine seem, to the people, both predefined yet brought about by chance.

After a while, the people realize that the images produced by this image machine, or really any image machine, are not the primary records of a real historical event as they once imagined, but the captured runoff of a process unknowable by the people because it has nothing to do with their own world, except strangely, that it is supposedly made up of their world. Like their world, the images formed by the machine are not naturally static, they are always changing, stabilized only by the choice of the artist to extract the image, back it against wood, and fossilize it in resin. Because the image, once physically actualized, is only ever a fossil, never capable of life itself, it is looked on with a certain distance that allows the people to consider the image's chance production and the artist's choice.

Or maybe the image is finally more alive than when it existed in the probabilistic cloud within the image machine, its distinct layers set in such a way as to allow emergent communication patterns that evoke not just conceptual recursions of the image machine process but also a new kind of experience. The people have trouble picturing exactly what that new experience is, but find that impasse, feeling the shape of something there without perceiving its details, pleasurable, imagining as well that the image machine experiences the people’s experiences through their image data with a similar pleasurable impasse. Still if the probabilistic cloud within the image machine was supposed to contain in its continuous stream of images a potential for universal images, then this image, in attempting to represent its origins through stabilized and singular form, struggles to fully convey the situation of its creation. This is why the image, taken from its fluid stream and set into stasis by the artist, finally feels more alive.

The more the artist extracts images from the image machine, though, the more the images confidently portray the situation of their creation. The images made manifest through different sizes and layouts, create a collection of images that allows the people to experience an externalized and defined version of the indefinite reality that brought about the images, a reality of a vastly different scale, the reality of the image machine.

-Anastasios Karnazes