Burnt by the Sun

Drawing on the Greek myth of Icarus, portraits taken in ultraviolet light reflect on the vulnerability of the youth, caught between climate change extremes and artificial intelligence. Both profoundly affect the quality of life for future generations.

Burnt By the Sun

Drawing on the Greek myth of Icarus, this book project reflects on the vulnerability and future of the youth, caught between climate change extremes and artificial intelligence. These two issues will profoundly affect the quality of life for future generations.

While watching an extreme weather event on TV, my 10 year old son asked me, “What if the sun goes out?!’ We discussed the myths and realities of this and then I asked him, what happens if our 'human sun', our soul goes out? There was no easy answer to that.

Icarus was the son of the inventor Daedalus, who constructed wings from birds' molted feathers and beeswax. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the Sun or the heat would melt the wax. Icarus ignored Daedalus' instructions, causing the beeswax in his wings to melt. Icarus fell from the sky, plunged into the sea, and drowned. The myth gave rise to the idiom, "fly too close to the Sun"

To fly too close to the sun means to act with dangerous overconfidence, recklessness or excessive ambition, leading to a sudden and inevitable downfall.

Are we, like Daedalus, flying too close to the sun with artificial intelligence?

Have we already been burnt? 

Inspired by this conversation and the story of Icarus, I took portraits at a night run at my son’s school. Children have to complete several laps on a track that is lit by ultraviolet lights. Ultraviolet rays are short light waves produced by the sun.

In twilght, ultraviolet light has an apocalyptic, otherworldly feel.

As they run past the UV lights, foam is sprayed, creating chaos.  Watching children collide and crumple into indigo heaps, made me think of the vulnerability of the human race at the coal face of new technologies and older world problems like climate change.

What dystopian landscape are we lurching towards?

A girl exiting a crush of limbs and foam evoked the proto-expressionist artwork by Edvard Munch, "The Scream", which depicts a deformed human figure screaming in a landscape with unnatural colours. The work was created in 1898 and has become a popular representation of the human condition and an icon of 'the anxiety of modern life.'

With greed for fossil fuels turning the world into a furnace and AI replacing jobs, what does the youth look forward to?

Are they anxious and angry at the world they have inherited ?

Are they angry enough?

Artificial intelligence is changing the interface of the human soul.
Like Icarus whose wax wings melted as he flew too close to the sun, what is revealed about our human 'poetics' and vulnerability as we chase the alluring "sun" of robot creativity?

Photographing a child closing sparkling eyelids against the sun, I wondered to myself, can we see the future more clearly when we close our eyes, when are minds are dark and still?

Can we hold onto our soul or have we damned future generations to lose it?

Humanoid robots stumble through football match in China

John Stuart and the false promises of AI 

 Solar engineering the weather