Last year I heard an idea from Eric Holthaus about how climate change is making Earth a liminal space—a threshold between two states often associated with uncertainty and unease. I’ve wanted to make a photo project around this idea since but never really knew how to approach it until now. I spent a week using DALL-E to imagine some altered landscapes of the future, trying to strike a balance between the plausible and sci-fi speculation, while using select adjectives to steer the AI towards liminality’s eerie and dreamlike nature.
I find it endlessly fascinating that as we change the world it changes us in return. And that we’re likely not ready to adapt to the unfamiliar and unrecognizable environments we’ve either created or set in motion. There’s something inherently unreal and dreamy (borderline nightmarish) about these AI-generated images that are perfectly suited to the task of exploring Earth’s impending liminality.
