Nude Ascending a Staircase, a collaborative artist book by Sam Lavigne and Georgica Pettus, departs from an archive of text prompts used to generate pornographic images, scraped from the website Civitai. The selected written inputs reflect a range of what users desire, while the visual outputs represent the attempts of generative machine learning to fulfill those wishes. By turns smut and source code, the explicit prompts often include both positive and negative cues for what an image should and should not include; the images build up algorithmically from that text, fractionally transforming from fields of beige noise into kaleidoscopic patterns, orificial buds, and floating protrusions. Arrested as abstractions, before their generation is complete, the images in this volume suggest a more open-ended imagination of bodies in a surreal process of becoming.

Published and created by prompt (Nicole Kaack and Mira Dayal).

Available for purchase here.