PHAEDO
by Plato
"Were you in personal attendance, Phædo, upon Socrates, on that day in which he drank the hemlock in prison, or did you hear of the matter from another?"
THE BEGINNING AND END OF BOOKS by Element Lee explores context and imagery through words and AI. The artist chose 21 books he read and selected the first and last sentences of each book as prompts to create text-to-image AI generations on multiple platforms with different styles. These images became the basis for the creation.
Writing a book is often an arduous task that may take months or even a lifetime. Some books are not completed until the end, while others are edited and continued by later generations. From beginning to end, the author's environment and life may change significantly. As for readers, we often start many books but don't finish some of them, leaving us unaware of their conclusions. Thus, it can be interesting to extract the beginning and the end separately.
THE BEGINNING AND END OF BOOKS is an experimental practice in transformation, interpretation, and misinterpretation.
