FILM—DOCUMENTARY

Making Off the Block
(Part I, 2023), (Part II, 2025), (Part III, 2026, coming soon) 

"Off the Block is an annual month-long summer documentary filmmaking workshop organized by the University of California, Riverside. Off the Block exposes high school student filmmakers to the history of film and the documentary format as well as equipping them with the artistic concepts and technical skills necessary to complete their own documentary. Beyond learning practical filmmaking skills, students develop critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and team building, as well as positive self-expression through the arts.

The award-winning program was created in direct response to the profound need for youth arts initiatives in the Riverside, CA area and is the only summer media literacy and documentary filmmaking program in the region. It is offered completely free-of-charge and all necessary filmmaking tools and supplies are provided to students.

Off the Block staff, through their teaching experience in higher education, draw upon the California state educational curriculum to develop effective and dynamic workshops and activities to impart film and media training onto students. Beyond learning practical filmmaking skills, students develop critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and team building, as well as positive self-expression through the arts. Over the past 10 years, the stories and projects that our high school students have produced have tackled difficult issues and revealed unique histories. These stories are told through a multitude of documentary techniques but have as their backbone stories from local citizens and community members."

View films here and here. 

Produced, filmed and edited by Steffanie A. Padilla 


AI GENERATIVE IMAGES

Worm in the Machine, 2025

Series of 6 images 
9 ½ inch x 9 ½ inch

This project began with a series of black-and-white photographs in which I documented a bitten apple as it was gradually consumed. I used these photographs to train a LoRA, or Low-Rank Adaptation model, to recognize the visual qualities of the series, including its soft lighting, low camera angle, and the fine surface details captured through a macro lens.

The images generated by the model transformed the apple into strange and unfamiliar forms, altering its colors, textures, and materials. In the early stages of generation, I became especially interested in the presence of diffusion noise: a haze of shifting pixels that appears before the image fully takes shape. Coming from a photographic background, I was drawn to this visual instability because grain and noise have long been part of photography’s material and language.

I then trained a second LoRA using selected images produced by the first model. This created a recursive process in which the system learned from and reinterpreted its own imagined forms. The six final images progress from warm to cool tones, creating a spectrum that suggests both a rainbow and a cycle of transformation. While one image still loosely resembles the original bitten apple, the others evolve into forms that appear otherworldly, synthetic, or biological.

At the center of the project is a meditation on consumption. The physical act of eating the apple is placed in relation to the digital system’s ongoing consumption of images and data. Through this connection, I consider our contemporary relationship with technology, desire, and the artificial reconstruction of the natural world.

The project also emerges from California’s overlapping histories of agriculture and technological innovation. By placing a familiar fruit within the mythology of Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Apple Inc. and a symbol of invention and reinvention, I present the apple as both a natural object and a technological icon. It becomes a point of connection between the tactile and the virtual, the organic and the engineered.

Through its recursive training process, the work reflects California’s culture of constant experimentation and iteration. Both the artist and the machine learn from what they have already produced, allowing the distinctions between observing, consuming, creating, and becoming to gradually dissolve.

*

Hallucinating California, the first show by Screenshot Fantasy, brings together ten artists to explore the Golden State as a center of echnology, culture, and myth. Each artist lives in California and has created their own unique AI model for the production of their work. This show is a collection of digital and physical artworks that explore AI through collage, sound, film, and image.

Works by Delta_Ark, Lucas Baisch, Vivian Charlesworth, Sam Galison, Maggie Hazen, John Mawhorter, Steffanie A. Padilla, Rosa Park, Edek Sher, Tim Wang.

Hallucinating California is curated by Edek Sher and is part of the 7th edition of the Wrong Biennale.

AI GENERATIVE IMAGES 

Every Day We Have to Invent the Reality of This World, 2023

Series of 6 images
Variable dimentions

"The past eighteen months have seen an explosion in public AI (artificial intelligence) image-generating software. Drawing from vast image repositories, systems such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion create a distinct kind of imagery that both echoes and distorts our familiar world. While they represent an emerging frontier of possibility, these AI-generated images also pose ethical quandaries, raising questions about plagiarism and copyright infringement; representation and bias; and the displacement of human artists. These systems, trained on our collective cultural imagery, also pose a compelling paradox: while potentially driving innovation, they may also risk trapping us in a perpetual feedback loop of our past, forever recycling our own image histories back to us."

*

The work in this exhibition was made by sixteen artists using new artifical intelligence image-generating programs. Jeff Alu, Ben Millar Cole, John Divola, Boris Eldagsen, Charlie Engman, Sam Finn, Diana Nicholette Jeon, Christopher Royal King, Lucia Grossberger Morales, Steffanie A. Padilla, Karchi Perlmann, Roope Rainisto, Kaitlyn Jo Smith, Jeff Soto, Synchrodogs, Jonas Yip.

Curated by Douglas McCulloh, Senior Curator and Interim Executive Director, and Nikolay Maslov, Curator of Film & Media Projects. Programs at UCR ARTS are supported by the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) at UCR, and the City of Riverside. California Museum of Photography.

Books

Coming soon