How Roope Rainisto’s AI photography redraws artistic boundaries

On April 5th, Web3 photography platform Fellowship dropped Post Photographic Perspectives, its first group show headlined and curated by designer and AI collaborative artist Roope Rainisto. Featuring 500 new pieces from Reworld, Rainisto’s latest collection, and an additional 1,000 works from 10 AI artists handpicked by Rainisto and Fellowship, Post-photographic perspectives is one of the year’s most anticipated NFT drops.

The show is at the center of several exciting technological and cultural developments that have sparked intense debate both inside and outside Web3’s walls in recent months. We sat down with Rainisto and Fellowship’s co-founder, Alejandro Cartagenaahead of release to get their take on the discussions surrounding AI art and the importance of pushing technological and artistic boundaries forward.

Rainisto’s vision meets Fellowship’s mission

Rainisto has seen a monumental rise to fame in both the NFT and AI art spheres in the wake of Life In West America, his successful February 2023 BrainDrops release that presented a fever dream vision of the idea of ​​the American West. This collection helped cement BrainDrop’s status as one of the premier platforms for AI art in the Web3 and has done nearly 1,800 ETH in trading volume on the secondary market since its release.

Rainisto’s style is both instantly recognizable and convincingly bizarre. Instead of trying to hide the fact that his works are the product of AI art tools, the AI ​​photography leans hard into the “AI-ness” of his image outputs, creating something familiar and alien all at once. Rainisto’s work, more than perhaps that of any other artist in the room, plays with the brain’s inherent pattern-seeking abilities, presenting viewers with scenes they’ve both seen a million times and yet never encountered.

“In the many years I have studied photography and art, there is something [in Rainisto’s work] which I have never seen before,” Cartagena said of Rainisto’s unique aesthetic while speaking to nft now. “He’s the only person who does the things he does with AI. His vision is very particular, concise and technically sound. What he has done is embrace the tool and its faults, its defects and found expression in just that.”

The Fellowship’s goal is to capitalize on the opportunity Cartagena sees in building a photography collection like no other on the planet. A photographer himself with decades of experience in creating, curating and collecting photographs, Cartagena believes that Fellowship can be the organization to consolidate 180 years worth of photographic history into one coherent and unique collection, unbound from the confines of museums that store 1/1 physical photographic work in vaults and halls that few people will ever see.

In November 2022, Fellowship collaborated with none other than Dmitri Cherniak for the release of the artist’s 100-piece generative photography collection, Light Years. Experimental releases like these are a perfect fit with Cartegena and Fellowship Co-founder Studio 137its vision, making the platform’s partnership with Rainisto a perfect fit.

“We see the Fellowship as this core collection that is the foundation for building into the future of what photography can be,” Cartagena elaborated. “We love the fringes of photography and the things that have made photography, photography. Because the NFT space moves so quickly, we can experiment in a very sophisticated and fast way. We are a gallery, a collection, we commission work, and we want to be a charity to support marginalized artists. We want to be many things because the NFT space allows that flexibility.”

Cartagena and Studio137 began collecting Rainisto’s work in early 2022. After contacting the artist shortly after, they agreed to collaborate on Rainisto’s follow-up to Life In West America — Reworld.

REWORLD and Post-Photographic Perspectives

The 500 pieces in Reworld are thematically similar to those from Life In West America, but differ in their particular focus. While the images in the latter centered on individuals and small-scale personal relationships, Reworld addresses larger concepts, forming a commentary on societal issues on a much higher level.

Starting April 5, the pieces in the collection will be sold in a Dutch auction format, starting at 10 ETH and falling by 0.4 ETH every minute until the price reaches a low price ceiling of 4 ETH. After this, the price will drop by 0.1 ETH every minute until it reaches a floor of 2 ETH, after which the sale will become public if there is any remaining inventory. The first 35 minutes of the auction are reserved for Patron Pass holders, the Fellowship’s annual membership token issued in March.

On the show’s second day, Rainisto switches from featured artist to curator, presenting 10 AI artists who were selected for their ability to showcase the range of what AI tools can do in the post-photographic arena. While some artists in the show’s second phase are known for their own approaches to AI photography, others take the concept itself “to the edge,” as Cartagena puts it. Featured artists for this part of the show include AI. SAM, Andres Hernandez, Antti Karppinen, Charlie Engman, Jess Mac, Julie Wieland, Katie Morris, Simon Raion, Ben Millar Cole and Pierre Zandrowicz.

The group show will also include at least one IRL activation, including an exhibit in May at an as-yet-undisclosed Los Angeles gallery and the Paris Photo Fair.

An artist like no other

At the age of 43, Rainisto has only recently begun to explore artistic expressions on his own terms. Having worked as a designer since the late 1990s, Rainisto’s artistic journey reached a turning point two years ago when he began to seriously consider how VR and AI technologies would begin to drastically change how the world works.

“I thought I can either be one of the first on this bandwagon or I can be one of the last,” Rainisto explained of his interest in AI tools while speaking to nft now. “I’m always excited about new technologies and trying to figure out how you can then use them [them] to create something meaningful. That was my inspiration.”

The 500 pieces in REWORLD, a collection he has been working on for the past year, are the final cuts from over 50,000 outputs that Rainisto made while building the series. They have Rainisto’s unique style: a surreal photorealistic familiarity steeped in Americana partly inspired by Robert Frank’s photographic book, The Americans. Rainisto also attributes the project’s genesis to the idea of ​​a road trip seen through the eyes of an algorithm, technology that, he says, represents a shared understanding of the world.

“They look at five billion images. In some ways, [the collection] is a road trip into a shared kind of humanity,” Rainisto offered as an insight into the project and his vision.

Rainisto is fond of his approach to AI photography, which quickly became known as post-photography, precisely because of the way it embraces its imperfections and the downright otherworldly way the algorithms “envision” the prompts given to them.

“We’ve all seen that AI can take pictures where you can’t tell if it’s a real picture or not,” Rainisto continued. “I think it’s fine, but my kind of reference point is the camera. When Stable Diffusion came out, my idea was to make the outputs look like a picture. I had successful renderings and things that had “failed”. But I found the bugs much more interesting. Instead of trying to hide ‘AI-ness’, what would happen if I tried to explore it?”

Reworld will be Rainisto’s last major collection in 2023. Aside from the time and energy it took him to create and release two series within a few months, he is hesitant to saturate the market with his work. Interested collectors can look forward to him continuing to experiment with AI art and working on 1/1s, animations, and potentially even small-scale limited editions. For now, Rainisto is advising fans of his work to purchase a Patron Pass on the secondary market so they don’t miss the rest of Fellowship’s 2023 shows.