
I’m davidname, a London-based synthographer working exclusively with artificial intelligence. This website is my online portfolio — a virtual gallery showcasing my work with AI across a series of themed projects. From imagined ceramics and sculptural illusions to fabricated flowers and synthetic prints, every image explores what it means to make meaning in a world of simulation. This is not a curriculum vitae or an autobiography; it’s a dialogue with technology — a collaboration between man and machine. People once said photography wasn’t art, but time has a way of altering perception. Now they say the same about generative AI — but in this space between fiction and reality, a new kind of art emerges. As real as Magritte’s pipe, as logical as Duchamp’s urinal, these works are digital hallucinations: crafted from prompts and photographed without a camera.
For enquiries: davidname.london@gmail.com
Fictional driftwood cabinets built from wreckage that never existed — constructed through artificial intelligence, not carpentry. Weathered planks, peeling paint, rusted hinges and traces of graffiti suggest realism, yet nothing here is real. These are impossible artefacts: convincing fictions designed to seduce the eye and subvert belief.
Digitally constructed floral compositions inspired by Dutch still-life painting — baroque, hyperreal, and precise. These bouquets never wilt or fade, their petals suspended in light and shadow. Conjured entirely through language, Anthos transforms abundance into illusion: flowers that exist only as image — radiant, impossible, and unreal.
Sculpted wooden flowers that exist only as illusion. Neither wood nor flower, these hyperreal forms are crafted entirely with AI — never carved, never painted, never touched. The images invite the viewer to believe in what cannot be held: digital objects that feel physical, poised, and precise. Every surface suggests weight, texture, and craftsmanship.
Inspired by Murano exuberance and Lalique restraint, these floral sculptures shimmer with the appearance of glass. They fuse decorative tradition with digital invention. Neither flower nor glass, each form is crafted entirely with artificial intelligence. Gleaming, translucent, smooth, and crystalline. The mind believes what the eye can see.
Idealised male physiques inspired by ancient Greek gymnasium culture. These figures are sculpted not by hand, but by language — dreamed into being, not photographed. Competition, rivalry, and erotic tension converge in images that celebrate the body as the product of discipline and exercise, charged with homoerotic intent.
Here, AI becomes a kind of kiln — a crucible where words are fired into form. Drawing on Shino and Raku traditions, these ceramic objects appear glazed, crackled, and poised between function and abstraction. Illusory yet tactile, Forma explores the boundary between usefulness and beauty, material and simulation, belief and perception.
Nature reimagined through an artist’s eyes. These images shift from observation to expressive abstraction — brushstrokes without brushes, paintings without paint. Colour and texture record sensation rather than reality. Created entirely with AI, Nemoris explores how nature might be translated into image — through words, gesture, and technology.
Suspended sculptural forms made of simulated fabric, metal, and discarded plastic — crafted entirely with AI. These assemblages feel physical: draped, buckled, and twisted into dynamic tension. Structa examines the textures of consumption and material excess, conjuring an architecture of detritus that reveals the strange beauty of discarded things.
Minimalist tulip studies inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe — stark, sensual, exacting. Where Anthos revels in floral abundance, Thalis embraces restraint: one flower, one gesture, rendered through AI with photographic precision. These images are quiet studies in beauty, simplicity, and the tension between light and shadow.
This floral series expands traditional cyanotype into a layered, digital spectrum. Created entirely with AI, some images explore CMYK halftones, colour floods, and offset textures, while others remain anchored in deep Prussian Blue. The work transforms botanical motifs into compositions that blur the line between print history and synthetic invention.
Here, the dirty workwear of manual labourers is fetishised through the lens of queer desire. These working-class heroes — gritty, tired, and masculine — were all created with AI. The images explore the tension between hardness and vulnerability, exposure and protection, and the slow, unspoken torture of wanting someone you can’t have.
This series of synthographs begins with a cut — into linoleum or wood. Stylised flowers and the male body emerge from these virtual surfaces, carved in digital relief. Inspired by traditional Linocut and Woodcut printmaking, but created entirely with language, these images explore how prompt and pressure can echo the mark of the hand.
Etched into black ink against off-white ground, these images recall the precision of etching and engraving. Male bodies and floral motifs alternate — rigid, poised, and controlled. AI hallucinations become part of the medium’s charm. Not pastiche or reproduction, but simulation. A modern take on classical ideals, made with the hand that doesn't exist.
Pull presents bold, colourful male portraits and figure studies imagined through AI with a screenprint aesthetic. Layered and luminous, these images transform the body into surface, icon, and gesture. More than imitation, they are synthographic visions — charged, sensual, and unapologetically contemporary in their presence.
Ceramic vessels paired with tables, rendered entirely through AI. From glazed finishes to mid-century lines, each composition feels plausible yet impossible — photographic, but not real. Ceta explores design through simulation, using AI as both sketchbook and lens. Nothing is physical, yet everything follows the logic of the tangible.
A digital nature study rendered with Flux 1.1 Pro Ultra. Synthetica explores artificial landscapes made by AI — glitched, pixelated, painterly, and precise. These images do not simulate reality; they reimagine it. Bold, synthetic, and unapologetically artificial, this is nature through the machine’s eye: invented, improbable, and eerily believable.
Ficta presents a collection of AI‑generated sculptures — non‑objects that feel tactile, uncanny, and utterly believable. Crafted in simulated materials, these impossible artefacts invite viewers to linger in a contemplative space between illusion and reality. Quiet, surreal, refined — yet undeniably physical in presence.
A series of imagined floral ceramics where clay and flowers merge into hybrid forms. Created with artificial intelligence, these objects hover between handmade and impossible — blossoms become vessels, petals collapse into bowls, blooms dissolve into abstraction — each carrying the uncanny tactility of things that don’t exist.
Tactile illusions rendered in soft, synthetic light. Textura explores the emotional resonance of material surfaces — nests, knots, voids — formed from simulated thread, fibre, and fabric. These are not objects, but sensations: visual murmurs of touch, memory, and silence. A suite of synthographs that whisper to the hand, as well as please the eye.
This series explores the simulated precision of vector graphics using generative AI. Clean lines, bold colours, and geometric motifs echo the aesthetics of digital design software — without using any. These are not true vectors, but visual imitations: constructed by prompts, rendered by machine, and flattened into symbols, shapes, and surface.
Flowers as surface and ornament. Inspired by William Morris yet conjured by artificial intelligence, these images transform nature into decoration — lush, luminous, and infinitely repeating. Each pattern is hyperreal yet unreal, convincing yet impossible — abundant without bouquets, ornamental without borders, infinite without end.
Elysia is the romantic chapter of Anthos — painterly floral compositions that hover between form and gesture. Soft, luminous, and dreamlike, they dissolve realism into mood. These bouquets are tokens of intimacy reimagined in digital form: abundant yet weightless, ephemeral yet tender, like fragments of romance suspended in light.
Echo is an experiment in reversal: artworks generated not from prompts, but from their own written descriptions. Each image is an echo of its text, a reflection made strange. The result is a cycle of translation — language into image, image into meaning — where creation folds back upon itself. What you see here is art eating itself. Now there’s an interesting thought.
Gestura stages painting as theatre: acid colours and expressive gestures pressed into pixels, framed and vandalised. Bold and performative, the work owes debts to Saville, Twombly, Pollock, and Emin, yet emerges as pure synthography — pictures painted with words, staged for an audience that insists on believing.
This project transforms gold, silver, and bronze into believable synthetic illusions. Minimal, museum-like objects appear weighty, physical, and tactile, but are conjured entirely with artificial intelligence. Each image is digital alchemy: surfaces that persuade the eye yet cannot be touched. Precious metals, made real by language and simulation.
Images that remember the feel of lithography. Male figures, flowers, tusche wash, and waxy crayon marks dissolve into textured illusion. Some forms are faint, others bold — but all are imagined. These are not lithographs, but synthographs: artificial impressions that simulate presence, pressure, and memory through the surface logic of stone.
Strata reimagines collage through Flux, where ceramics, design-classic chairs, sticker plants, and flat flowers collide with graffiti vandalism and digital overlays. These works borrow Photoshop’s logic of layers and sabotage, producing unstable images that feel built, erased, and rebuilt. Synthetic illusions staged as posters, restless and defiant.
Typo explores the beauty of illegibility. Inspired by Carson and Brody, this series embraces spelling mistakes, pseudo-alphabets, and typographic collapse. Pages fracture, words dissolve, and meaning drifts into noise. Flux’s weakness with text becomes its strength: communication is not what words say, but what they refuse to say.
Here, brushstrokes become internal weather systems. Storm investigates mood instability through abstraction — how depression is not a metaphor but a real climate in the mind. These synthographs fracture the language of painting: bold gestures, bruised tones, shifting pressure. They are psychological environments — visceral, agitated, and restless.
Three materials that should resist one another — glass, ceramic, and wood — are persuaded to coexist. Under the precision of artificial intelligence, they learn empathy through tension. Each image reveals a fragile accord: clarity meeting weight, reflection meeting warmth, difference held in balance. Beauty emerges, not from harmony, but from understanding.
Illustra explores the origins and future of illustration through simple, AI-generated drawings of everyday ingredients. These images question what remains of craft when the hand is replaced by the prompt. A collaboration between artist and machine, the series reflects on skill, authorship, and the evolving act of making pictures in the age of artificial intelligence.
Light isn’t colour; it’s energy. This project explores illumination as both substance and condition — geometry, vibration, and frequency rendered as synthographic digital artworks. Across eighteen images, light behaves like a living force: crystalline, etherial, and infinite. The work is not about looking at light, but standing within its quiet radiance.
On the pebble beaches of Rottingdean, on the south coast of England, Totem gathers seaweed, feathers, driftwood, and stone into quiet digital rituals. Each assemblage feels both handmade and elemental — part sculpture, part apparition — a series of small prayers to impermanence, offered to the tide where nature and imagination briefly touch.
This project explores the sensation of flesh through simulated paint — not the body’s external image, but its inner pulse. Eighteen synthographs blur language and material, where meat becomes metaphor and colour behaves like anatomy. A meditation on matter, mortality, and beauty hidden from view beneath the surface.
Splice explores collaboration between artist and artificial intelligence — a fusion of craft and cognition. These synthographs draw on the ceramic “third firing,” where matter gains reflection and unpredictability. Each piece becomes a dialogue between human and machine: language as clay, image as thought, surface as consciousness.
A series of eighteen digital camouflage paintings exploring bureaucratic distortion, diagnostic uncertainty, and the quiet violence of misinterpretation. F31.ER4SE transforms system failure into abstract pattern, colour drift, and procedural fracture — a synthographic examination of how institutions see, mis-see, and overwrite the human.
This project stands as the bridge between past and future — a beginning disguised as an ending. Here, Flux.2 reinterprets eighteen earlier projects using their original texts, reading, misreading, and reimagining them into new forms. Not a retrospective but a hinge, Archive reveals how vision evolves when one system inherits the dreams of another. Generative tools are changing — not simply improving, but learning to see and behave differently — and these synthographs offer a small glimpse into their evolving nature.

When I look online at what passes for AI-generated art, I see an aesthetic that repeats itself endlessly. It is a default look that dominates social feeds and community platforms: endless glow effects and hyper-detailed surfaces, particle storms and glittering textures, stitched together with familiar tropes — glowing orbs, vaporwave neon
When I look online at what passes for AI-generated art, I see an aesthetic that repeats itself endlessly. It is a default look that dominates social feeds and community platforms: endless glow effects and hyper-detailed surfaces, particle storms and glittering textures, stitched together with familiar tropes — glowing orbs, vaporwave neon, fantasy portraits, over-saturated dreamscapes. Again and again, the same genres reappear: cyberpunk skylines, armoured warriors, dragons circling floating castles. These images are designed to grab attention but not to hold it. They impress at a glance, but only for a moment. They are surface without substance — glossy, algorithmic spectacles made for the scroll, not for the wall. Of course, there are talented synthographers producing strikingly original work, but I am speaking of the broader flood of images that now dominates search results. When so many use the same tools, models, and prompt clichés, the results converge into a uniform aesthetic. You can often spot the AI look in a second, whatever the subject.
My own work is a deliberate departure from that default. I aim for restraint rather than excess, cohesion rather than chaos. I build projects that are structured, not scattered; each series has its own palette, its own logic, its own internal consistency. Rather than relying on fantasy clichés or algorithmic spectacle, I choose motifs that are grounded — objects, flowers, landscapes, textures — and treat them with care. I want the images to breathe, to hold their place, to live with you over time. This difference matters. It is the distinction between making “AI art” and making art with AI. The tools are the same, but the intention is not. Where most see an engine for excess, I see a way to work with precision — to explore subtle variations, to create quiet illusions, to test how far restraint can go. My projects are not one-off images but carefully developed bodies of work, each carrying its own logic from first prompt to final curation. I’m not against bold colour, but I’m against when it’s paired with formulaic spectacle. In a culture of visual abundance, choosing calm, order, and refinement is not timidity; it is a position. It says: an image can be generous without shouting; it can be decorative without being empty; it can be new precisely because it refuses the easy, overused tricks. That refusal is not a limitation — it is the work.

AI art is a misleading label. We don’t call painting “pigment manipulation” or photography “mechanical picture-making.” Every medium has needed a name, not just a description of its tools. Synthography is that name: a recognition that these images belong to a practice distinct from painting, photography, or digital collage. To call them s
AI art is a misleading label. We don’t call painting “pigment manipulation” or photography “mechanical picture-making.” Every medium has needed a name, not just a description of its tools. Synthography is that name: a recognition that these images belong to a practice distinct from painting, photography, or digital collage. To call them simply “AI art” is to blur them into a mass of outputs with no authorship, no discipline, no method. Names matter, because they give shape to a medium. They tell us how to look, and how to judge. Synthography is not everything that passes through a machine; it is the work of making something with intention.
Synthography begins with collaboration. The artist works not with brushes or cameras, but with prompts — language turned into form. Whether in DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Flux, or any model yet to come, the principle remains the same: the artist writes, selects, iterates, and curates. The machine generates possibilities, but the work emerges through human direction — the patience to refine, the judgement to choose, the vision to create series with internal logic. This is not coding or automation, nor the casual pressing of a button. It is a practice built on discipline, taste, and clarity of intention. The machine is vast, but directionless. The artist provides the path.
Every new image technology has entered history under suspicion. Photography was dismissed as a mechanical trick, cinema as vulgar entertainment, digital tools as shortcuts. What unites these histories is not just resistance to change, but the failure to recognise a new way of seeing. Synthography is no different. It is not an extension of photography or a branch of painting, but something separate: a third image. Where painting organises pigment and photography fixes light, synthography shapes possibility itself. It uses language as raw material, building images from fragments of thought that unfold into form.
To define synthography is not to lock it down, but to give it space. A name makes a medium visible, distinct from the vague cloud of “AI art.” It marks the threshold where novelty becomes practice, where experiment becomes method. For me, synthographic artwork is structured, deliberate, and project-based. It is not spectacle for the feed, but a body of work that can be lived with, returned to, and thought through. The definition matters because it resists the idea that the machine replaces the artist. Instead, it shows how collaboration can create something neither could produce alone.
I work under the name davidname, and synthography is the medium in which I speak. The third image is not the end of the history of pictures, but its continuation — another way of seeing, another way of making, another way of asking what an image can be.

All images are illusions. From prehistoric cave paintings to oil portraits, from photographs to film, every image has always been a construction: pigment on plaster, silver on paper, pixels on a screen. The arrival of generative AI has not changed this; it has only made the illusion more explicit. What appears to be glass, wood, or metal
All images are illusions. From prehistoric cave paintings to oil portraits, from photographs to film, every image has always been a construction: pigment on plaster, silver on paper, pixels on a screen. The arrival of generative AI has not changed this; it has only made the illusion more explicit. What appears to be glass, wood, or metal in my work is none of those things — it is language turned inside out, hallucinated into form by a machine. The result is not a copy of reality, but a convincing fiction: images that ask to be believed, while admitting they were never real to begin with. New technologies of image-making have always been met with suspicion. Photography was dismissed as mechanical reproduction, cinema as vulgar spectacle, digital tools seen as shortcuts. Generative AI inherits the same doubt — treated as novelty or threat rather than possibility. Yet, like every tool in the creative industries, its value depends not on the engine itself but on how it is used. In careless hands, it produces clichés; in deliberate ones, it opens new frontiers. My work begins here, testing how far illusion can stretch before it breaks.
I call this process digital alchemy. Where alchemists once tried to turn base matter into gold, I transform words into images. Glass that cannot shatter, flowers that cannot wilt, metal that will never tarnish, light that never fades. Each project is an experiment in persuasion, seeing how far illusion can go before it collapses. And in a culture saturated with altered images — from filtered portraits to deepfakes, from staged social feeds to fabricated news — the distinction between truth and fiction is already unstable. We live inside simulations, whether we acknowledge them or not. My work does not attempt to disguise this condition; it makes it visible. These are not objects, but synthographic artworks: simulations that may take the form of vessels, figures, surfaces, or gestures, precise enough to feel physical yet forever intangible. To call them synthetic is not to diminish them — it is to recognise their nature. All images are synthetic. The difference is that here, illusion is not a failure of vision but the very material of the work. In my practice, this means creating series that test illusion across different motifs: glass that seems to refract, ceramics that seem to crack, bodies that appear sculpted. Each is impossible, but convincing — not because the machine is flawless, but because the artist knows where to push, and where to stop.

Generative AI can simulate almost anything: wood grain, blown glass, stained metal, ceramic glaze, the shimmer of water, the fall of light. It can render objects that feel physical even when they are made of nothing but text. But the human face behaves differently. A portrait is not just a picture of a person; it is an encounter, a negotiation, a moment captured between two presences. Painters interpret this encounter. Photographers witness it. AI, by contrast, hallucinates it. The result looks convincing at first glance, but something essential is missing — not realism, but reality. The faces produced by diffusion models resemble people who never lived, yet they carry the burden of being treated as if they did. This is where the medium falters, and where my unease begins.
I have made such portraits myself. Projects like Gymnos and Kalos explored fantasies drawn from classical ideals and queer desire. They were studies in presence, masculinity, and erotic energy — the gymnasium, the working body, the charged tension of looking. At the time, I was interested in how far the machine could stretch the illusion of photography, how much physicality it could conjure from nothing. But as I worked, discomfort grew. The men in those images felt too perfect, too symmetrical, too compliant. Their beauty was engineered by the archive of the internet: youth-centred, porn-adjacent, optimised for desire. They were compelling illusions, but also red flags — not because they were erotic, but because they were empty. They had no histories, no voices, no consent. They were vessels shaped entirely by prompts, reflecting a cultural appetite I no longer wanted to feed.
The face is sacred in a way objects are not. A vessel can be invented freely; a flower can be conjured without consequence. But a portrait — even of a fictional person — occupies a different ethical space. A face invites intimacy. It invites projection. It invites desire. And when that face resembles a photograph, the viewer instinctively treats it as evidence: someone who was there, someone who stood before a lens, someone who allowed themselves to be seen. AI breaks that pact. It produces likeness without personhood, expression without experience, eroticism without body. Even its flaws — the extra finger, the softened jawline, the silicone sheen of synthetic skin — reveal a deeper dishonesty. These are not mistakes of craft, but mistakes of understanding. The machine does not know what a face is. It does not know what a body means.
What troubles me most is not the fantasy, but the believability. AI-generated men look real enough to desire, real enough to compare ourselves to, real enough to circulate without question. They slip too easily into the visual economy of filtered selfies, deepfakes, and non-consensual imagery. Even when no real person is harmed, something about invented youth feels exploitative — the perfection is too polished, the bodies too obedient, the gaze too ready. These portraits do not depict anyone, yet they shape expectations of everyone. The fantasy becomes indistinguishable from the standard. The synthetic ideal becomes the cultural one. And the more I worked in this territory, the more I saw how quickly beauty becomes pressure, how easily eroticism becomes a commodity, how readily simulated men slip into the same aesthetic machinery that distorts real ones.
Turning away from AI portraiture is not an act of retreat, but of clarity. I have no desire to create faces with no stories, bodies with no lives, or images that blur the boundary between desire and deception. The medium excels when it deals with objects, materials, and abstractions — things that can be simulated without ethical weight. But the human face deserves more than probability. It deserves presence, encounter, witness. In my practice, illusion is a material, not a trick. It is something I shape with intention, not something that shapes me. And so I choose to work where illusion can breathe freely: in vessels and flowers, textures and landscapes, images that welcome invention without trespassing on the territory of the real. I have stepped away from AI portraiture not because it fails, but because it succeeds too easily — offering beauty without depth, likeness without life, and fantasies I no longer wish to conjure.
I wrote these thoughts in the weeks before Flux.2 arrived — before the tools learned new ways of seeing, and before I understood how much the medium would change. I leave the words as they are, a record of an earlier horizon. The work ahead will answer them in its own time.
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