Realms, After Darger, China/Cambodia, 5m x 1.2m, 2023

This phantasmagorical panorama merges digital and geographical extremes to conjure a surreal, hybrid world. Inspired by the outsider artist Henry Darger, the work seeks to evoke a childlike, ethereal vision that is also deeply uncanny. The composition’s upper half was captured using a Gigapan camera in the ancient ruins of Angkor Thom, Cambodia, allowing for immense detail across the sprawl of temples and jungle. The lower half is constructed from a similarly large-scale image of the Terracotta Army in Xian, China—its solemn rows now interrupted by a riot of colour and digital characters. Overlaid upon this layered historical foundation are hundreds of AI-generated figures. Some emerge directly from Darger’s visual language—little girls in battle uniforms, fantastical creatures—while others feel absurd, kitsch, or oddly dislocated, complicating any single reading of the scene.

The strangeness of Realms lies not only in its uncanny fusion of disparate historical and cultural landmarks but in the way it reconfigures digital imagery and AI-generated entities into an unsettling, dreamlike realm. The AI figures, algorithmically derived yet seemingly imbued with narrative suggestion, blur the boundaries between human creativity and machine invention. This coexistence of human history and artificial fabrication destabilizes the viewer’s sense of time and place, engendering a liminal space where mythic pasts, contemporary technology, and outsider art converge. The image’s uncanny effect is heightened by the oscillation between hyperreal photographic detail and the eerie artificiality of its digital inhabitants—some playful, some menacing, all evoking a fractured narrative identity. In this way, Realms embodies Hal Foster’s assertion that “we live amid images without bodies and bodies without images” (Foster, 1996, p. 146). The work visualizes a fractured presence, a terrain where the synthetic and the organic, the real and the imagined, coalesce and conflict, inviting reflection on how AI and digital reproduction transform our perception of history and memory.

Reference:
Foster, H. (1996). The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. MIT Press.