GREATEST: Luke Nugent’s AI Universe

More often than not, this patchwork of nostalgic references mutates, merging and spilling from body to body and gesturing to an era more recent than distant. Combined in one world, such a blend of styles could only have emerged from a contemporary vantage point, one that borrows liberally from the past. It’s an idea reinforced by the globalized character of what’s depicted: young people of different nationalities and ethnicities, aloof and invincible, set across what appears to be a host of iconic cities. We could be in the streets of London, Paris, Tokyo, Rome, Beijing or New York. The occasional glimpse of iPads and mobile phones is maybe the truest indicator of the times to which these scenes belong.

But tracing Nugent’s images to a particular time and place, like you might a photograph, is ultimately beside the point. However convincing, they’re not photographs at all, but digitally rendered images created with a text-to-image AI tool. Those who inhabit them aren’t “real” people: They’re imagined avatars, their plausibility fortified by embodied schemes of familiar aesthetic choices. To make them, Nugent feeds carefully conceived written prompts into Midjourney, his go-to artificial image generator. Sometimes, the tool’s preliminary output will in turn become a feed image, which the artist loops back into the circuit to “dig down further into an idea,” stopping only when it yields the desired results. “It’s a case of generating a kind of contact sheet and then selecting the right edit like you would with digital or analog photography,” explains Nugent of his tech-assisted process.

Having worked as a photographer based primarily in the studio for the last 15 years, Nugent’s turn from the camera to AI was somewhat serendipitous. “I started exploring it about a year ago, maybe even less,” he recalls. “AI tools were becoming a bit more advanced, more photorealistic, and I was playing around with them. I posted an image online without really thinking about it […] That got quite a lot of likes, then the second one I shared got about 30,000 likes and more comments than I’d ever had before. It just snowballed from there, really.” The appetite for this type of imagery should probably come as no great shock. Contemporary culture seems equally as infatuated with what’s been as what’s around the corner. Today, a burgeoning metaverse rubs shoulders with a Y2K resurgence.

Despite the clamor for his AI-shaped worlds, Nugent is hesitant to commit himself to these newfound pastures. His first love remains photography, and he suspects that chances to apply his shiny new tools to commercial assignments won’t be around forever. Clients might soon take them up independently, eradicating the need for a human co-collaborator. “But then other people will always want an artist,” Nugent speculates. “A photographer, a creative that’s independent from their brand, someone with a background in image-making.” I’d like to share his hopes, soothed by the notion that technological strides have often spawned corresponding countermovements, where craft, materiality and the analogue rage quietly against the machine.

Away from the computer screen, Nugent’s photographic practice depends upon the labor of fellow creatives. Each shoot requires a troupe of skilled assistants, runners, models, stylists, hairstylists and makeup artists to bring ideas to life. But with all these moving parts, Nugent’s turn to AI was a means of freeing himself from the many environmental factors that define a day at work, from elevated emotions on set to the demands of needy stakeholders, or just the tiresome chain of calls and emails that come with any project. Taking back control—and ceding some to AI—Nugent sidesteps monotonous obligations. “You’re not influenced by what anyone else wants, so you can just explore things. Sometimes you need to be alone with your own ideas, with a tool that’s feeding back on them, independent of other people.” It’s akin to the solace that many photographers find in the darkroom: a meditative, sacred space where ideas crystallize and external pressures briefly dissolve.

The notion of escapism is a driving force behind Nugent’s subject matter, too. Exhumed from the underground and owing much to history, his fashionable characters echo the subcultural scenes he was drawn to in his high school days. The niches his artworks reference that he didn’t himself experience, like the New Romantic movement, speak aptly to those he lived firsthand. The work thus conjures the separate intrigue that comes with observation, of perceiving alien communities from their fringes without ever stepping in. “I’ve always had an interest in subcultures, and I suppose throughout my teens I explored partaking in a few of them, as you do,” he says with a smile. “Growing up in London in the Myspace era, being around these young emo kids, drinking on the street […] It’s about evoking the sorts of people I would have hung around with when I was 17.” 

When social media exploded in the late 2000s, it revolutionized a simpler time. We readily forget that the first iPhone, armed with a 2-megapixel camera, was launched only in 2007. Before the days of Instagram and TikTok, identities were largely constructed in angsty bedrooms and presented at malls, on city streets and at house parties. Our early attempts to do the same online were often clumsy, if not entirely regrettable. “Do you think that’s why these images resonate with Zoomers?” I ask. “A young generation of digital natives hearkening after something a little less complex?” Nugent nods in agreement. “Definitely. When I think about the images that resonate with me, they certainly reflect a simpler time in my life, a time when you’re only really concerned with yourself and how other people think of you.”

Although these preoccupations aren’t entirely wholesome, they constitute inevitable parts of any coming-of-age story. For a generation saturated in galaxies of images and raised on instantaneous communication, the possibilities for self-expression—to be everything, everywhere, all at once—know few bounds. Neither do the associated strains. Perhaps the manner in which social media’s troubling realities gradually displaced its initial thrills, from its well-documented effects on mental health to its insatiable appetite for our data, has also fueled our cynicism toward AI. We should, surely, be wary of those who design and deploy these technologies, a staggering proportion of whom have come to voice their own fears as to the implications of their self-made monster, with other proponents now seeking urgent regulation at the governmental level.

Further ethical questions emerge from the process of AI. The mechanics of deep learning text-to-image AI tools mean that any “new” images are informed by an unfathomable cosmos of existing ones, mined at lightning speed from online databases. The many biases of photography or of image-making in general, as to who or what is depicted and how, are therefore replicated over and over; disobedient, unconventional images are condemned to the periphery, while the tropes of commonly produced images invariably assume dominance. Then there’s the divisive question of copyright. When an image is AI-generated, are the many image-makers that (unknowingly) shaped its output being plagiarized, robbed or appropriated? Facing polarizing reactions to his own AI-powered experiments, fashion photographer Charlie Engman offered a counterproposal, suggesting in a succession of Instagram stories that these outraged positions might be “turning us all into landlords who believe we own everything we do or touch.” Hasn’t creativity always been, in Engman’s words, a distinctly “communal process”?

Gazing again into Nugent’s images, AI-shaped cracks come into new focus. Occasionally, separate figures within the same group shot appear illuminated by contrasting light sources, while characters’ hands are often awkwardly misshapen, enhancing already uncanny worlds. Products of the technology’s shortcomings, these slippages add their own sense of surreal intrigue, with construction—not deception—always the artist’s intent. “When I started, I wasn’t doing it for anyone else. It was more for my own sense of memory, nostalgia and for entering new realities,” Nugent reminds me. “When you land in one of these worlds, you can sort of explore it by changing just one thing you’ve written.” Via his virtual journeys, Nugent has begun to apply newly learned principles to his photographic work. “I’ve always been quite formal in my compositions, so working with AI has helped me unlearn some habits that had become a bit repetitive,” he says. “I’m trying to loosen up, inspired by the slightly more abstract compositions you get with this stuff.”

Perhaps we can think of Nugent’s AI images like those first Myspace profile pictures we shared, shot on clunky flip-phones or pocket digital cameras. In both cases, new forms of image creation and dissemination stemmed from technological advancement, the applications of which changed rapidly in front of us. Where we might regret the naiveté of our early social posts, or where Nugent might observe an “outdated” quality in some of his AI commissions by the time they’re published, both form the surface layer of hotly contested technologies—and it’s those who wield them for insidious ends that we should look to keep in check. “I’m not stupid enough to think of AI as just a tool,” Nugent concludes. “There’s so many people with sinister reasons using it and no one really understands its true potential. It’s almost like an iceberg, isn’t it? These neural networks are kind of like unseen monsters, but if they’re used by artists in a careful way, in the right way, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing.” 

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