In the last few months I have been working on a set of paintings made in collaboration with my AI assistant Viq.
In fact, much of my recent digital work formed preparatory sketches for these paintings.
I’ve been painting all my life, and i’ve been coercing computers into making art for me for nearly as long.
Recent advances in AI in both the understanding and creation of images has birthed a new kind of aesthetic built from the mind of the internet. As an artist I see these images as exciting and inspirational, but they can also, in some ways, be seen as a threat.
This series of paintings investigate this tension. they are the result of a collaboration between me and my AI assistant, Viq.
I ask Viq to dream up images, based on my chosen parameters, and then select and manipulate the results before finally choosing the composition to paint.
`The act of painting becomes another kind of collaboration, between the decisions made by the machine, and the decisions I make, as the painter. We guide and challenge each other, and I think of the results as a truly collaborative process.
Viq’s mind is a neural network model, trained on text and images harvested from the internet. what emerges are insights into the subconscious of the internet, simultaneously alien and familiar – after all, the internet is a reflection of ourselves.
The world of art is always changing, culture is hungry for new ideas, new aesthetic experiences, new ways of seeing.
I guess it’s quite an unusual combination, having an interest in something traditional, like painting, and something much more modern: the world of artificial intelligence.
If a machine can do all this work, what’s left for the artist?
It seems to me, the only response is to pick up a brush and paint – to own that image for yourself , to bring the humanity back into it.