Artist, Seth Price: I’ve been using metal in my work. I like that this particular panel is highly reflective.
Learning Specialist, Marco Hermosillo: That's the artist Seth Price. He uses a combination of physical and digital tools to make art.
For paintings like this one, he starts by spreading paint on a metal surface using things like brushes and his feet. If you look closely, you might even notice a few spots with footprints. Then, he adds more details to the work by using digital tools like generative AI and 3D animation software.
Seth Price: It’s like this idea that you could have one kind of imagery, and then you have something else that has its own world of meaning, and they’re right next to each other, and you have to put that together.
Marco Hermosillo: Take a look at that shiny circle in the top left corner. If you look really closely, you can see a reflection of two people standing above a large painting on the floor. But it’s not a photograph. It’s actually an image that Price created on his computer.
Seth Price: I like to mix the real and the fake. And at some point, when I was making these works, I realized that a lot of the images we see around us in the city—advertising images of an iPhone or a billboard floating in space or jewelry in a magazine—these are not in fact photographs. They’re created in computers out of math.
Marco Hermosillo: This detail is interesting because it’s an invitation to ask ourselves what is real and what is fake.
This is something we’re all dealing with now, especially on social media. Can you think of a time when you had trouble telling the difference between a real photo and a picture made by AI? How did that feel?