Natalia Purchiaroni

MFA Photography, 2025

After experimentation with image generative software, I was not shocked but very disappointed to see what old stereotypes and biases were being carried into a new, developing technology. I didn’t need it to show me these biases persist though; we can see it without the devices and software. Realistically, these programs compile all of our past, present, and future information, and spit it back out to us in a meticulously coded and concise form. Something feels confining about that. There are patterns, coding, algorithms, software, ideas, forms, designs that confine us, they shape our perception of the world. It reminded me of the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkin Gilman.  

Wallpaper adorns an interior space and comes up in history, especially art history, as a symbol of certain economic class. It is a narrative form of design that holds its subjects into unyielding repetition.  This Victorian inspired AI generated wallpaper serves as a passage of time in a sense. The reference to the famous short story puts it into comparison to the effect of developing software on our everyday lives. It is the coding that we live in and therefore cannot yet escape.