Digital Garden Slop tackles upon concept of fragmented distortion of reality that potentially leads to AI-slop. There are three points of feedback happening: humans collect and classify nature to preserve, study and understand it. The collecting process itself takes the subject out of its natural habitat, hence losing a lot of data about its living environment. Then, training AI based on those images creates a second layer of reality - we get new images which, depending on how big the dataset is, will create an unlimited gallery of the butterflies, making each slightly different from the others. And ultimately, these AI-made images can potentially end up on a training dataset, leading AI to 'eat up' its own creation.
In my project, I took images of scientific butterfly illustrations for the purpose of representing how humans collect natural data with its unique patterns and individuality, and how AI tries to imitate and recreate them, making a new reality.