Laura Knowles

Technology is a subject of fascination and exploration and this collection represents a developing conversation around Artificial Intelligence and the everyday. Applying Artificial Intelligence to jewellery, often considered an everyday object, reveals a number of anxieties and apprehensions in how we might utilise technology in future designs. In particular, our fear of ‘deepfakes’ combined with future generations of ‘trans-humans’ led to an investigation of human faces as a subject matter for this collection. Research for the collection asked whether this technology might be used solely as a tool or source of inspiration; or might it be truly creative in a human sense? This also led to wider philosophical examination of our God-like role in creating forms of digital consciousness that may ultimately be more permanent and powerful than ourselves. By mimicking AI’s function of sculpting, and extruding AI generated faces, the collection consists of wearable artefacts that reflect a conversation between the machine and me.