The Legend
2024

The Legend

The Legend is a work that is created and realized during an Artist in Residency at ARoS from 1 October 2023 and six months onwards. The project forms part of the development of ARoS Public Engagement, which is a rethinking of the department that engages the public.

The Legend is a suggestion of how we will once again dream about the future, and find the faith that the world once again will be a good and safe place for us to live in. The project relates to the doomsday currents of recent years, which has taken the breath away from many young people who are unhappy and do not believe that neither the planet nor humanity has a future.

Creating something yourself or together with others is an important experience when developing solutions to the major problems of our time. It is the young people who have been assigned that task. Artistic creation is a wealth of ideas and knowledge of materials, and holds great power when you master both parts. Art shows us reality from a different perspective and strengthens the understanding of ourselves as a spiritual being – and for the community.

The Legend sets a framework for a collective process with training classes from Engdal School and Aarhus State Gymnasium at ARoS, where we place ourselves in a reality where contemporary problems have been solved, and "look back" with imagination and the power of thought, and answer how.

In a workshop format, groups of 4-5 people had to write sentences describing a proposal for a solution to a problem. The phrase feeds the AI ​​image generator DALL-E2, which, with specific codes regarding stylistic features, generates an image in a genre that is suitable for subsequent inclusion as an element in a long pictorial frieze of colored sand. There were around 200 people, mosty children and youngsters throughout the period.

For the project, AI was used, as there is a point in transcending the views of the group, and instead involving the entire large collective that is the Internet. Furthermore, it is an interesting discussion to plant AI in the context of ARoS together with co-creation, because both challenge the perception of the artist as author – and the whole institution's view of the artist and her individual distinctiveness.

The project resulted in a picture frieze, which was based on the AI ​​generated images, which were combined into a united motif. At the end of the exhibition and the project, a final assembly was held, where I ran a small rake all the way through the sand, so that the otherwise sharply drawn lines of the sand flowed together and formed a blurred motif. This ending symbolizes how physical actions have a great influence on the entropy of the system in question.

The project is supported by ARoS and Aarhus Kulturudviklingspuljen.

Special thanks to ARoS for being the location for the project and to the students from Engdal School and Aarhus State High School for participating in the project.