amalgamous

A lockdown side project

Ever since I studied creative coding on a Masters degree, I've maintained a watchful eye on the computer-generated art market. My casual interest in blockchain technology began to blossom in 2013. Fast forward to 2019, and Sotherby's is auctioning an AI-generated piece by Mario Klingemann. Shortly thereafter, the art world witnesses the surge of popularity in art sold as NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

What intrigued me the most was the emergence of generative art utilizing the transactional mechanism of a blockchain smart contract. With each user interaction involving the smart contract to acquire a piece, the artwork materializes based on a set of predefined rules established by the creator*. Every piece stands distinct; each one brought into existence through the intricacies of code. (see Art Blocks).

Is art Art if created by machine?

While automation expands the human capability to focus on more humanistic qualities of life, such as creativity, Artificial Intelligence (AI) existentially questions what it is to be human.

Utilising machine learning, amalgamous seeds a generative adversarial network (GAN) with 20th Century landscape paintings. By engaging with the parameter controls of the GAN’s output to 're-position the AI’s lens', adjustments of data values are used in place of paints and brushes. amalgamous is the conductor of the AI’s focus within an environment he has populated.

Diverging from the known, converging to the unknown; slowly and precisely a portrait emerges of a face that does not exist in our human flesh-and-bones world.

The resulting combination of automatic machine intelligence and the serendipitous consequences of human creative input are the images presented below. A 20th century landscape painting by a master mutated into a portrait by machine and man.

*(The set of rules for the main project, ongoing since 2011)

Next: a new phase begins for the larger project began in 2011