Sentient Muppet Factory by Beth Frey

Post Photographic Perspectives II: Acceptable Realities is Fellowship's second group show celebrating a new wave of innovation in AI video and photography. Inspiration for Sentient Muppet Factory stemmed from a talk I attended by Laurie Anderson, who used puppets as an analogy for new technologies. Imagining my AI-generated images as part of a late 1970s variety show, I began to develop the concept of “Sentient Muppet Factory.” Although the title humorously references AI discourse - as these muppets are not truly sentient - the term "factory" speaks to the mechanized production facilitated by AI, as I churn out new characters in a seemingly automated manner. All the pieces were generated using a bank of images stored on my computer, primarily consisting of the early NightCafe pieces, along with a few photos of myself in my studio. Purposefully utilizing disparate source imagery from the text prompts, I aimed to provoke an unsettling result.