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The images are huge and square and harrowing: a form, reminiscent of a face, engulfed in fiery red-and-yellow currents; a head emerging from a cape collared with glitchy feathers, from which a shape suggestive of a hand protrudes; a heap of gold and scarlet mottles, convincing as fabric, propping up a face with grievous, angular features. These are part of "Faceless Portraits Transcending Time," an exhibition of prints recently shown at the HG Contemporary gallery in Chelsea, the epicenter of New York's contemporary-art world. All of them were created by a computer.
The catalog calls the show a "collaboration between an artificial intelligence named AICAN and its creator, Dr. Ahmed Elgammal," a move meant to spotlight, and anthropomorphize, the machine-learning algorithm that did most of the work. According to HG Contemporary, it's the first solo gallery exhibit devoted to an AI artist.
[...] The AI-art gold rush began in earnest last October, when the New York auction house Christie's sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an algorithm-generated print in the style of 19th-century European portraiture, for $432,500.
Bystanders in and out of the art world were shocked. The print had never been shown in galleries or exhibitions before coming to market at auction, a channel usually reserved for established work. The winning bid was made anonymously by telephone, raising some eyebrows; art auctions can invite price manipulation. It was created by a computer program that generates new images based on patterns in a body of existing work, whose features the AI "learns." What's more, the artists who trained and generated the work, the French collective Obvious, hadn't even written the algorithm or the training set. They just downloaded them, made some tweaks, and sent the results to market.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday March 15 2019, @07:53PM (2 children)
OK. So it could paint in the style of Pollock. But Pollock was only partially about his style...from his point of view, perhaps not even partially, but from someone who doesn't understand him, that's all they see. Somehow Pollock was encoding some meaning into his work. I don't understand it, but I don't understand Joyce or Faulkner, either. So something that only paints in his style isn't producing genuine imitation Pollock's.
(OTOH, there's a story about Picasso where he is quoted as saying "I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone.", so it may well be that not everything that Pollock did in his style was a "genuine Pollock", in the sense of representing what he was trying to show.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @07:59PM
> there's a story about Picasso
Currently reading Norman Mailer's "Portrait of Picasso as a young man" -- good fun read, with many photos of his works in the context of his friends and lovers at the time they were painted.
Picasso started painting very young, and early on learned to work very fast, his lifetime output is huge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @09:09PM
I have a hard time with that kind of stuff. "If you look deeply enough, you'll see the artist's true deeper meaning." I'm pretty sure you'll see what you're looking for. To see the same "true deeper meaning" as someone else you either havea similar perspective to start with, or heard what they saw and are trying to see the same thing. (Like english literature class.)
To put it in computer terms, an artist could dump a megabyte of /dev/random and anyone who looks at it with the right one-time-pad will see the plain text message. It's just random noise - the meaning/message is entirely due to the filter applied by the receiver (ie the OTP).
Now I don't know about Pollock, maybe there's a dependable source of statements -from him- clarifying the deeper meaning he was going for - so there is an objective truth to what the artist meant by his works. Without that, nothing says one POV is objectively "more correct" than another OTP, er POV.