Is Anything Real?

This new series updates Coldwell’s ongoing examination of photographic truth, but now for the age of AI. These surreal and strangely anachronistic brutalist cityscapes are actually AI recreations of Coldwell’s 2020 photography series Everything is Real. The learning model has conjured these forms by studying Coldwell’s illusionist photography of buildings, but unlike that earlier series, nothing we see here can be believed. In trying to interpret Coldwell’s deceptive photographs of the built environment, AI has accidentally invented impossible architectural forms. Towering structures that defy the laws of physics, but look strikingly real.

Each successive generation of variations seems to mirror Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra.