A small selection of original artworks available for purchase. These are unique, one-off pieces — once sold, they will not be reproduced.
My practice spans film, drawing, collage, and mixed media, often exploring themes of technology, perception, and the spaces between physical and digital experience. The research archive Living as Data documents ongoing investigations into AI emotional understanding and is not for sale.
To enquire about any work or arrange a studio visit in Folkestone, please get in touch.
Unhindered AI — Concertina Books
Heidi Stokes in collaboration with Mercedes Bunz
Unhindered AI explores how AI systems process images and how the technology of 'machine learning' is enabling computers to understand and generate human language. It explores how the systems generate meaning with a curiosity for machinic difference: AI systems do not create images or language the same way humans do. Instead, what it does is more akin to data visualisation.
Unlike humans who get inspiration from reality, AI models derive what they make only from what they've been trained on. They don't really 'know' anything; the best they can do is spot and reproduce trends from data. This series explores the machinic side in a playful and haptic manner including the hallucinations, mistakes, and biases AI systems have become known for.
Available
AI Bias
2023
When it comes to bias in AI, examples all have one thing in common – data. AI learns bias from the data it's trained on, which means researchers have to be really careful about how they gather and treat that data.
AI perceives texture not form. It gradually develops an image by revealing edges, lines, followed by pixels and then gradually recognisable parts of an image.
This series developed from a keen interest in the pervasive integration of artificial intelligence into our daily lives. We now have numerous applications that offer us statistics on exercise, diet, and sleep — nudging and reshaping our behaviours through data.
As Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: "Unlike any other species on the planet, Human beings have created a whole system made up of just imaginary ideas." The question is whether we have used our abilities wisely.
The series grew out of an animated film of the same name. Each work is A5, mixed media on paper, combining intaglio printing, drawing, collage, and stamped typography.
Animated film that inspired the series
Available
Breakfast at 8am
2023
Part of the Unusual Rules series exploring how AI and data applications shape our daily routines and behaviours — from when we eat to how we account for every hour of the day.
The text embedded in the work — lagging / behind / left my body — speaks to the disconnection between physical experience and its digital representation, the body as data-point falling behind the algorithm's expectations.
The stamped phrase referred to as { human } + = questions how systems classify and categorise people — reducing identity to a data type, a label within curly braces.
Arrows, dashes, and 10 jumps >>> FINISH map the body's movement as a set of instructions — fitness reduced to a gamified sequence of commands, tracked and completed.
A figure mid-scroll, coffee in hand, absorbed in a feed. The text below reads like pseudocode: # scroll......... / stop ........ {look} scan / ......... finish — our attention reduced to a loop.
A figure hunched over a desk, surrounded by orbiting crosses and dots, with the dictionary definition of evolved printed above: verb / past tense: evolved / 1. develop gradually. A meditation on whether the system evolving is us or the technology we made.
