Some of my early CGI inkjet images from 1996. I created a grey scale bitmap scanned from a 19th century medical illustration of the head, Stomach and ribcage and imported it into the Bryce landscape rendering engine with tiled metallic textures scanned from real world oxidised copper. Rendering times around 18 hours on a G3 Macintosh.
The original Bryce software arose from work with fractal geometry to create realistic computer images of mountain ranges and coastlines. An initial set of fractal based programs were developed by Ken Musgrave (who later created MojoWorld) a student of Benoît Mandelbrot, and extended by Eric Wenger. Wenger later met and worked with software artist Kai Krause to design a basic user interface. The first commercial version, Bryce 1.0, appeared in 1994 for the Macintosh.
Bryce 2.0, shipped in 1996, included much beyond the original notion of creating a realistic mountain range. These included independent light sources, complex atmospheric effects, the addition of primitive forms with Boolean methods to combine them, and a revamped Texture Editor. Bryce 2.0 was also ported to the Windows platform, although the first stable version, 2.1, was not released until 1997. The following is a short AI tale based on these 'Bionic images' created by modifying and evolving prompts through ChatGPT. Images originally exhibited at a London Independent Photography group show at the Barbican Library arround 1998.
Becoming Other
When the surgeons opened my skull, they found something none of them expected an orchard.The neural branches weren’t just nerves; they looked like twisted limbs of ancient trees, glistening with sap light. My thoughts clustered in white petals, blooming and collapsing in slow waves. It was as if my mind had grown wild in the dark, rooting itself into the bone, refusing the sterile lines of the machines waiting to replace it. They said I had a choice: repair or rebirth.
I chose rebirth.
The second body grew in a tank below the theatre, its surface smooth as a river stone. Vines, synthetic and vascular, fed it oxygen and memory, drawing shapes across its surface like calligraphy. I watched it rise and fall with borrowed breath. It was me, but not. A version built from my intentions rather than my accidents.
Down there, where the fluid mirrored pale light, the frame took on its own gravity. The supports arched like ribbed cliffs, touched by a shifting blue that seemed to answer the pulse in my own chest. I saw reflections, my face, then not my face, rippling as if deciding who I would become.
On the final day, they asked if I was ready to cross over. But I had already begun. Somewhere between the blooming orchard in my skull and the mirrored chambers below, my consciousness had dripped into the new vessel, drop by drop, like water learning the shape of a new container.
When I finally opened my eyes in the second body, the world didn’t feel mechanical. It felt grown.
Above me, the old brain, my old brain, was still blooming quietly in its glass case. A relic. A garden. A reminder that even in the age of wires and circuits, identity could still behave like a wild, stubborn root, reaching for light through any material it could find.I left the institute that evening walking differently, not human, not machine, but something that understood both.
And as I passed a darkened window, my reflection looked back at me.
It smiled.
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