#9

e30d #9 − Frames of Reference (Life In West America) Object: Parallel Reality Artist: Roope Rainisto Owner: Rhyd0n Date: January 2024 When Roope Rainisto released Life in West America in February 2023, it was clear a new visual language had arrived. Radically novel and visually astonishing, the AI-generated collection definitively sliced through the stream of artificial media starting to flood the internet. The 500 "post-photography" images in Life in West America reflect the tradition of documentary photo books, presenting everyday American scenes that feel rooted in the 1960s milieu of Cadillacs, blue jeans, and diners. Remarkably, while Rainisto’s work nods to the documentary aesthetic of a past era, it concurrently serves as a contemporary chronicle, documenting the aesthetic evolution of advanced diffusion models. While the specific images may be new, the cultural fragments they're composed of are not. A tension between old and new, foreign and familiar.