Sentient Muppet Factory: Beth Frey’s Dreamlike Art in the Age of AI
all images by @sentientmuppetfactory
By: Andrea Nazarian
There’s something delightfully unsettling about Beth Frey’s work as Sentient Muppet Factory. Vivid moments that feel rife with nostalgia yet totally surreal, toeing the line between the delicate and the grotesque, the innocent and the perverse, the serious and the utterly absurd.
Trying to describe Frey’s work to someone is like trying to describe a mushroom trip to your aunt who leaves the house exclusively for bingo - it’s really, really hard. That struggle to define, that heavy lifting your brain does trying to decipher what the hell your eyes are feasting on - that’s what lights Frey up.
do you know what’s going on here? neither do I
“I’ve always been interested in using humour in my work and creating seemingly contradictory feelings or aesthetics,” she explains. “Embracing that abnormality in a way. Putting characters in a context that feels really familiar while challenging ideas of bodies and normalness. I love ambiguity. I love it when there’s an image and you don’t know exactly what is happening.”
When you really sit with them, the images might start to look like something out of an obscure late 70’s art film - but these characters and sets never actually existed. These weird, wonderful scenarios were created by Frey with the help of DALL-E, an open AI system that can create realistic images and art from a text description. Yes, the robots are making text-to-art now.
sensual kitty doesn’t care what you think
It sounds ominous, but the way Frey sees it, DALL-E is just another digital tool to express her organic, human-generated creativity. Growing up in Nanaimo and eventually settling between Montreal and Mexico City - she developed her artistic practice with painting, drawing, sculpture and video work. Working with different mediums helped her get accustomed to new ways of creating and thinking about art.
“I’m always curious about trying new tools and of course, when the AI stuff came, it was an easy thing to become addicted to,” Frey explains. “I’m not 100% on board with all of it but at the same time I don’t see it as the death of art.”
There’s a lot of mystery when it comes to art that’s been generated (at least in part) by a machine. It’s easy to anxiously picture a Matrix-esque future where computers have replaced artists and everything creative we have to offer. Hopefully our fate won’t be so dire, but for better or for worse the tech is here and it’s going to shift our artistic landscape. How and how drastically is still unclear but it does make me wonder - what is the role of the artist in the age of AI?
pondering life’s big questions with a trusty helper
For Frey, it’s about adapting to new technologies and finding creative approaches to working with them. DALL-E didn’t just spit out the final images we see on Sentient Muppet Factory. It’s Frey who manipulated, edited and refined the images into what they are now. With the prompts, DALL-E produces something interesting but unpolished, and it’s inevitably the human touch that brings it to life.
“I create my own images,” she says. “Once you get into a process and you’re editing more and more, the work becomes yours. When it’s done, it feels like it's been difficult to get to the end result - so the art feels like it’s mine.”
There are also questions about ownership that inevitably come up in this context. Frey has commercial rights to her work, meaning she can sell it - but the ultimate ownership belongs to DALL-E. This makes things tricky when clients approach her asking to use her work for something like album art.
what music do you hear when you look at this?
Then there’s the question of ethics. Frey’s moral compass is refreshingly strong in a time where many AI-assisted creators and businesses couldn’t care less about profiting off another artist’s work (we see you, Lensa AI).
“I don’t want to be making images that could be taking somebody else’s job. I don’t want to be using names of living artists as prompts,” Frey says. “There are alot of bad players who want to be using this technology and are not considering those things. Or corporations. In the end, money will speak over some sort of ethics. So there’s a lot that I’m also concerned about.”
As AI becomes more and more ubiquitous, falling into dystopian thought patterns can be a slippery slope. It’s important to remind ourselves that there are many ways to look at the same phenomenon. So when I learned about Frey’s experience finding an abundance of human connection through her AI art, it made things seem a lot less threatening.
art, the great unifier
“I’m always thinking about what’s next and I’m not just going to be doing these images for years. I’m looking at ways to make other things. I see a lot of people talking about how AI is the death of art but if anything, it’s been bringing me together with so many more artists,” she says.
Sentient Muppet Factory is followed by some of the most avant garde creatives working in fashion photography and pop culture today, including Harley Weir, Jack Bridgland and Alana O’Herlihy. The virality of the Sentient Muppet Factory Instagram has connected Frey with more people than ever before - artist, photographers, makeup artists, even puppeteers. Bonding over their love of artistic creation (and Frey’s creations) this newfound online community is finding ways to collaborate and connect in ways Frey never imagined. It’s beautiful.
Technology is advancing faster than ever, and there’s a whole lot of grey area when it comes how AI will change our lives. Artists will never stop expressing themselves creatively, and humans will always connect with one another over art. If we can use art to foster community, celebrate one another and respect eachother’s creative autonomy - I think we can find a lot to look forward to.