Richard Petrucci

Category: Work

Work

  • Cats and Concrete

    Today’s AI generation was too real.

    First, I used Adobe’s new Photoshop Beta with this prompt, because it advertised the new Firefly model. The image it produced is bordering on realistic, but the cat is looking illustrative.

    “a domestic short hair cat sitting on a window sill with a cherry pie”

    What’s great about this is the faux moiré in the window. The AI is generating a photography error that occurs when the pattern of an object and the grid of pixels on the camera’s image sensor are unable to resolve. The moiré it has generated looks like heavy handed clone stamping done by a human. Does the model have examples of bad retouching? How many pictures of windows in the model have a window screen in focus? How many pictures in the model have fixed or unfixed moiré? These are the sort of questions which I imagine are infinite. How many parameters could you request or identify or fix?

    Moiré example:

    Then we have the same prompt but in the Firefly 3 Beta browser environment:

    This image would fit right in on https://www.reddit.com/r/standardissuecat/

    The cat’s camera left ear is too big. The crust of the pie farthest from the camera is uneven in a synthetic way. The cat’s camera left shoulder feels odd behind the… is it a wall? Wait why is the window sill a table or wall feature? The AI looked at the composition problem and decided that to get the cat and the pie in the shot, it should raise the pie closer to the defining feature of the subject. And it invented this faux table to get there. Maybe the AI reasoned that drawing the whole cat in photorealistic detail would be too difficult, garnering it a bad review. To avoid the failure of a whole cat and a whole pie and a whole window sill, it zoomed in, and placed the pie on a completely unbelievable platform.

    Then I tried a New York Times headline to see what the new model was thinking. This is “Some Concrete Reasons Not to Be Totally Panicked“, The New York Times, April 29, 2024, by Gail Collins and Bret Stephens.

    This is one of the four initial results. The aesthetic decisions here are so interesting. My parameters were 35mm lens, realistic photo, F1.8. I did not give any reference or do any retouching. This is an emotional picture of blocks of concrete. Right up my alley. The holes on the blocks are seemingly trying to be random and ordered at the same time, hoping to emulate the holes that might appear on a block of concrete used in construction. I also see some of the smaller blocks are mimicking slices of marble. The sun flare is tasteful. The speckles of sunlight hitting the generic brush on the mountainside is delightful. There is even a little pile of broken matter in the foreground, so cute.

    I’m wondering about how much this picture looks like a picture I might make. I’d be drawn to this if it existed. The blue shade side of the pile in sharp relief to the warm sunset. Good time of light. The blocks arranged so carefully. A soft touch with such a heavy and brutal material. The blocks sitting tucked into a cozy corner at a site that is quiet. The feeling of the sun setting before a chilly dusk.

  • Olana

    Olana, Richard Petrucci 2024

    Frederick Church‘s Olana as photographed from Thomas Cole‘s estate.

  • You’re Not Alone

    I made this video last Fall, 2023. Driving past the suicide prevention sign outside the bridge always engenders a wooden feeling inside me. “Would this actually help someone?”, I think. Would this have helped me? The bridge sits underneath Olana. The site of Frederick Church’s home, above the shore of the Hudson River, looking West. A site of much importance because of what Church saw there, and then painted. A site useful because of what it looked out upon, but only to one man. His paintings then become the image of this place. I wonder how many people drowned in the river during Church’s lifetime? He died in 1900, the bridge finished in 1935. How many people have jumped off the Rip Van Winkle Bridge? I won’t look it up. This video is really about looking. Looking through the frame that has been set up to see a place like Church’s canvas would have. To then walk the bridge to see what couldn’t bee seen until the bridge opened.

  • Tactical Maintenance

    The subject of this project is the notion of the garden. A place delineated as separate from both untended nature and the artificial structures of civilization, containing human made arrangements of natural materials.

    It’s important to distinguish the garden as a humanly delineated space, which is not naturally occurring. Each garden has a tactic of maintenance which cultivates the intended nature and discourages growth of unwanted species, and prevents decay of the grounds themselves.

    Is nature to be enjoyed? Is enjoyment a product of our time? Louis XIV felt that wilderness provided no pleasure and that nature had to be arranged by man to be appreciated. The earliest gardens were most likely naturally occurring clearings “…such spots are the gardens of the gods, or of those favoured by the gods, so that they need do no work to keep the place in order.”

    The garden provides a controlled space. It is built by humans and embodies culture. A “wild” landscape has it’s own conditions and will continue without human involve- ment. Enjoyment of such a wild place means to accept it, because it was created by numerous consequences beyond any plan. To enjoy a garden is to take pleasure in a person’s work. While some gardens aim to be in conversation with nature, others claim dominance over it.