In a tribute to Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play “Far Away,” this AI collaboration imagines a world where animals, humans, and machines rise up to battle for an equitable planetary present.

This 48” image, influenced by Japanese ink brush scroll paintings, was made using DALL·E 2 to generate a database of unique source material, then used this as a repository of source material—much like a stack of Life Magazines painstakingly cut and assembled into complex collages. Text requests include calls for 1930’s Japanese scroll paintings and agitprop of “a frog tasting a man’s foot with its tongue” / “humans being chased by wild animals and frogs” / “an army of geese flying and marching” / “an army of swallows and humans in jetpacks flying and marching together” / “swallows and airplanes” / “a grainy sky with a military submarines and orcas” / “water from an underwater perspective with very tiny people running” /”a church scene with a frog deity”. Using DALL·E 2’s outpainting technique, Zurkow builds visual coherence in her database, an uncanny, approximated aesthetic to create material that can be composited together.