I'm David Name, a London-based synthographer working with artificial intelligence as both medium and collaborator. This website is my online portfolio: a virtual gallery of themed projects exploring the strange physicality of artificial images. The works are not records of things that existed, but propositions: digital artefacts that borrow the language of photography, painting, sculpture, printmaking and design while belonging fully to none of them. A wooden cabinet that was never built, a ceramic vessel that was never fired, a body that was never photographed, a flower that never grew — each image stages a negotiation between fiction and material presence. These projects form an ongoing conversation with technology, art history and the ghosts of older media. As real as Magritte's pipe, as logical as Duchamp's urinal, they are digital hallucinations: crafted from prompts and photographed without a camera.
For enquiries: davidname.london@gmail.com
OMENS is a symbolic bestiary of simulated hand-pulled relief posters. Eighteen birds and animals become signs, warnings, heralds and forces, rendered through flat black ink, carved marks, limited colour and printed titles. The series explores relief-printing language, animal symbolism and the precise uncertainties of prompting.
Arca II revisits my first published project through a new conversation-to-image process. Fictional cabinets are assembled from reclaimed timber, driftwood, peeling paint, rusted hinges, sign fragments and stencilled numbers. More logical than the original Arca, these synthographic objects feel handmade, functional and weathered.
Eighteen synthographs of a standing male figure, each generated from a near-identical prompt altered only by its final stylistic instruction. Conceived as a research exercise rather than a conventional project, it explores simulated mediums, visual languages, prompting, and the difference between filtering an image and generating one.
Here I present eighteen floral synthographs inspired by mezzotint, the dark intaglio process of tone, pressure and burnished light. Flowers emerge from velvety blackness as monochrome apparitions, suspended between historical printmaking and generative AI. A garden of half-light, drawn from darkness by a hand that does not exist.
Eighteen metallic flowers occupy the border between botany and artefact. Forged in blackened steel, pewter, nickel silver, copper, bronze, and iron, these synthographs transform bloom into object. What once seemed delicate becomes weighty and persuasive, as floral form passes into metallurgy without losing its recognisable grace.
Bicep is an 18-image synthographic study of the male upper arm as an emblem of strength, vanity, discipline and desire. Moving across drawing, painting, print and photographic realism, the project treats the bicep not simply as anatomy, but as a compact symbol of masculine aspiration, display and self-belief. The Flexed Biceps emoji (💪) says it all.
A synthographic study in continuity, where one invented man remains recognisably the same across eighteen images. Using reference-led generation in Flux.2, the project explores identity persistence through changes in clothing, posture, mood, and setting, asking when repetition stops producing pictures and begins to produce the sense of a person.
A synthographic drawing project in which a single urban bird recurs across eighteen images, gradually acquiring identity, continuity, and a quiet fictional life. Working through repetition, behaviour, and minimal urban settings, the series explores character, companionship, and what drawing becomes when made with artificial intelligence.
Vita rebuilds the still life under synthetic conditions. Glass, silver, ceramic, linen, driftwood, flowers, and fruit appear with painterly authority, yet none has ever existed. The project explores materiality, vanitas, and belief, asking how artificial images inherit the quiet conviction of a historical genre without the objects depicted having any origin.
This project examines masculinity as a restless process of optimisation and display. Through synthographic images that move between drawing, painting, and photographic realism, the project explores looksmaxxing, grooming, fitness, and vanity, asking what happens when the body becomes both private insecurity and public advertisement.
Eighteen male figures presented as contemporary devotional archetypes. Saint, sinner, sailor, soldier, lover, king and angel become bodies of belief: erotic, symbolic, staged and unstable. Drawing on religious iconography, fresco, graphite, paint and photographic realism, the series treats masculinity as image, ritual, inheritance and mask.
Greige explores the strange sophistication of a colour that is barely a colour at all. Working within a narrow grey-beige palette, the series uses panels, weathered surfaces, faint grids, collage traces and floral ornament to turn neutrality into tension. Blandness becomes unstable; restraint becomes visible; taste begins to hesitate.
