Chair Test
Produced using one of the earliest public versions of DALL-E, this series focuses on the plastic monobloc chair, a familiar object that can be found almost anywhere. It is the kind of thing most people rarely pay attention to until it fails, breaks, or, in this case, is handed over to a machine for interpretation.
By asking the system to generate this familiar object, the project turns a banal request into a diagnostic tool. Rather than reproducing the chair with certainty, the model negotiated its form through approximation. Legs fused together, proportions shifted, surfaces oscillated between photographic description and painterly gesture. The resulting images revealed a system that recognized the category of "chair" without fully understanding what made it a chair.
In this sense, the work functions as an early document of how generative systems encountered ubiquity, exposing both their technical limitations and their accidental expressions. Today such outcomes have become difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce. As image generators have converged toward an uncanny standard of visual fidelity, they have also shed much of the expressive instability that characterized their earliest stages.
