"Holy Skull of God" is a symbolic representation of a model of deer, springbok, blesbok, pig and cow bones. It was trained and generated from a Stable Diffusion LoRA model composed of photography of animal bones. It fits into the simulation stage of representation. This art has more realistic twin that was captured on analog film called "Sky Face" and "Unholy Skull Of God". "Bones: Vanishing of the Genuine" explores the beauty of bone and sky in life, death and simulation using analog film photography and AI as inspired by Georgia O'Keeffe's bones in the New Mexico sky and Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. Bård examines the authenticity of artifacts by juxtaposing bones, their photographs and AI generated images, questioning the transition from reality to symbol to simulation to simulacra. Through the stages of an AI simulation and process a new reality is constructed. Process The process to create Bones was to gather animal bones from ethical suppliers, but one key deer skull was found on the side of the road. These bones were photographed with analog film cameras against the backdrop of the sky. The developed film was scanned and Photoshop was used to remove the filament holding the bone up. The photos were used to train multiple GAN and Stable diffusion models. The process illustrates the progression of the real bone into a physical representation on film, then digitized into more symbolic systems. The model training turned the images of the bones into a simulation that can recreate any sort of bone and the background of the sky. A final stage for a rare few tokens was to image the digital Ai image back onto analog film. These images tip into simulacra where the image no longer refers back to any real or even symbolic bone but exists in a self-referential loop of images. The art of "Bones" fall into four stages of representation. It begins with the real physical bone - Reality First the film photograph represents the symbol, a reflection of reality - Symbol Second the film is digitized and edited to remove fishing line hanging bone in the sky - Distorted Symbol Third the AI images generated from the model - Simulation Absence Of Reality Fourth the AI images processed on film and model trained from first order model. A self-referential entity, creating a hyperreal world where the distinction between reality and simulation is obliterated - Simulacra It is of note that the models were not completely trained on film photos. About 2,000 photos were created using a Olympus Pen EE-3, Mini Diana, Nikon A8008 and iPhone 12. Around 1,500 were film and the rest were digital photos from the iPhone and the Dehancer app emulated Kodak Gold Film. RIGHTS & LICENSE: The NFT collector receives: Non-exclusive Display rights (private/public) Permission to create remixes and Ai model training with attribution Artist retains reproduction rights, commercial licensing, reproduction rights Artist may produce limited edition prints of this piece Copyright 2024 Bard Ionson LLC