These Books Do not Exist is an “artistic dataset” of curated, AI generated book imagery. Using the FLUX.1 diffusion model, images were created of texts both plausible and wholly speculative, examining how the latent-space of the model represents their overall design and contents. It is one of the outcomes of a critically playful excavation of contemporary generative AI that I conducted over the course of 2024-25 – an extension of earlier work around ‘critical image synthesis‘. The subject matter is itself derived from my longstanding interest concerning the nature of generative writing and text-image relations. Ultimately, this collection has been conceptualised primarily as a catalogue of research materials, to be explored and interrogated as the viewer may wish. In the present febrile context concerning AI and its impacts on every level of creative publication, it is these bigger issues and questions we might reflect on that constitutes the real source of interest here.
These Books Do Not Exist can be viewed by clicking on the page spread below, or through this link. Please note it is a large file, and may take some time to download.
