Damien Roach (RCA) - 2023-24 Students
10029968@network.rca.ac.uk

Acid Realism: how can hacking the perception-altering mechanics of painting with Artificial Intelligence interrogate the lived experience of a globally unstable, permacrisis-afflicted present through fluid, spatially and aesthetically hybrid image series?

Noting the latent affective potentials held within the material and discursive mechanisms of painting, and their ability to produce time-bending, liquid, unstable image-events, ‘Acid Realism’ utilises AI systems to produce image series’ that hack, rewire, and redeploy this toolkit of conceptual-imagistic systems. ‘Acid’, transposed from Mark Fisher’s ‘Acid Communism’, summons a spectral unrealised utopia of freedom characterised by the 1960s counterculture’s embrace of creativity and its reality-altering perceptual shifts. The research will construct and explore a fractured gestalt of fluid, divergent, paralogical parts to give a psychic scaffolding to today’s volatile reality via the conceptual and imagistic technologies of painting.

Primary supervisor: Dr Melanie Jackson

Secondary supervisor: Professor James Coup

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