"The Great Piece of Australia I' [2022] is an animated still life by Luke Conroy. It is a study of a seemingly unordered arrangement of Australiana that combines ‘real’ images alongside images created with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The title of this series of work references Albrecht Durer's 'The Great Piece of Turf / Das große Rasenstück' (1503), a meticulous observation of nature in almost scientific detail. Completed over five centuries later, ‘The Great Piece of Australia’ series is a distinctly 21st century vision of nature. In this piece, human observation is combined with artificial intelligence and the lines between fact and fiction are blurred. Artificial intelligence was utilised in the work through using a ‘text-to-image’ process whereby a computer was instructed to generate a variety of surreal images based on a set of text prompts by the artist. These text prompts were around the theme of ‘Australiana’, for example listing various names of native flora, fauna, or iconic locations. The resulting surreal images can be thought of as what the computer “imagined” upon reading each text prompt. In the final work the artist incorporated this combination of real and ‘computer imagined’ imagery. The result is a work that can be seen as a collaboration between artist and computer. It is a vision which mixes reality and imagination, creating a ‘piece of Australia’ that is strangely familiar and other-worldly all at once. Video details: 1080wx1920h pixels, 25fps, 15 second loop, no sound. "