Christie Jarvis builds 3D worlds that read as hand-made, and the mixture of tools behind them is now the interesting part of the practice.
Machine output, human decisions
Generative tools produce the raw material — surfaces, variations, textures at a volume no one could model by hand. What Jarvis contributes is selection and composition, which turns out to be where the work's character actually lives.
Keeping the darkness
The output stays consistently unsettling, which is not what these tools default to. Left alone they tend towards the pleasant and the plausible; the tonal control here is applied against the grain of the software, deliberately.
Craft in the edit
Jarvis is direct that the tooling does not reduce the labour, it relocates it. Less time is spent building geometry and more spent discarding, and the discard rate is high enough that the practice looks less like modelling and more like editing.
Where the tools are heading
The output quality of generative 3D is improving faster than the controls for directing it, which makes taste the scarce input rather than skill. Jarvis expects that to invert as the tools mature and is deliberately building a body of work that does not depend on any particular software. That looks like sensible hedging against a stack that changes every eighteen months.
