Substratum, 2024
Substratum, digital video, no audio, 40 seconds, loop, 2890x4096 px
Substratum is part of Omnia Ludens, a larger series that begins with images designed to make machines see correctly: printer calibration targets, registration marks, generic portraits, color bars, and test patterns. These images promise neutrality, accuracy, and control. When passed through generative AI systems, however, they begin to mutate into scenes, bodies, architectures, rituals, and impossible environments. The work considers how reality is trained, corrected, standardized, and performed through images. It reveals that even the tools designed to measure visual truth are unstable, and that artifice may be one of the clearest ways to see how reality is made.
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Omnia Ludens, a poetic translation from Latin meaning “Everything in Play,” reflects on authenticity and artifice in the age of artificial intelligence and synthetic image creation. The project begins with printer test images: standardized mosaics of generic photographs, color bars, registration marks, gradients, and shapes designed to maintain accuracy in mechanical reproduction. Southworth repurposes these utilitarian images as prompts for AI diffusion models, transforming tools of calibration into catalysts for hallucination, invention, and visual drift.
The printer test image functions as both material and metaphor. It represents a technical pursuit of precision, consistency, and control, while AI generation introduces fragmentation, mutation, and chance. By placing these systems in conversation, Omnia Ludens explores the tension between accuracy and imagination, mechanical reproduction and neural network appropriation, standardization and infinite variation.
Southworth’s background as a photo retoucher in the advertising and beauty industries informs his ongoing interest in image manipulation, digital imperfection, self-perception, and constructed authenticity. In Omnia Ludens, he turns toward the visual detritus of printers and the vast image archive absorbed by AI systems as sites of conceptual inquiry. What was once used to correct images becomes a way to question how images are made believable in the first place.
The project asks what happens when authenticity and artifice are no longer opposites, but intertwined conditions of contemporary image-making. Is an image authentic because it begins with human intention, or does every process of fabrication, whether mechanical, digital, or conceptual, produce its own form of truth? Through Omnia Ludens, Southworth considers a world in which every image can be remade, every reference reassembled, and every visual standard put back into play.