Nothing is Ever New –
I often tell my students about a great piece of advice that I received as a photography student over 30 years ago. The advice was simple, but it has had a profound effect on my work through the decades.
It goes like this……
“When you have your finalised brief or theme – go away and brainstorm 5 ideas and write them down on a piece of paper. Once you have your list, screw it up, or better still tear it up and throw it in the bin. Why???…Because those 5 ideas will probably be the exact same 5 ideas that everyone else will come up with.”
I now always pass on this little piece of advice to all my students. They usually give me a look of abject horror, having just spent the last two hours working on the first idea that came into their heads.
Yesterday Noah, one of my fellow students, kindly alerted me to an artist who is working very much along the same lines as me. Here is an Instagram link to his work.
I am not really surprised by someone else working in my area of trying to marry up physical and digital realities. Ai art generation is only just breaking into human consciousness so naturally there will be lots of interest in it. I suspect many will want to investigate how it can be harnessed within an art context. Indeed on some level I had very much anticipated this. If I’m honest, the juxta positioning of digital and physical realities was probably the third idea written on my list. So, taking my own advice I pretty much knew that this concept was headed straight for the bin. However, I still feel my search for a new form of human hybrid ai, digital and physical art (as per my study statement), remains valid. Designing the concept is easy, the actual manifestation of it much harder. Below are my digitised hand written notes exploring how I might progress my project. I continue to search for that unique angle in full knowledge that many others will also be treading this path.
A Few Handwritten Ideas
More Random Thoughts
Generally, I feel that I’m battling with ideas. There’s so much that I would like to try. I always seem to have a constant stream of ideas that I want to further explore. This week has been no exception. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across Ai image to video. This particular technique absolutely fascinates me. Having already run some of my Luminograms through the software I thought it would be very interesting to see what my weekly Zentangles would look like? Below are two experiments I ran using my Zentangle images as my seed images for the videos.
Image to Video Animation
Image to Video Variation (Record Player Filter)
Prism Photography – A Journey of Light
Using a similar ‘Ai’ technique as above I shot a wide variety of torchlight and prism stills which I used to generate the following video.
Original Prism Stills
Prism Photography (Inverted) – A Journey of Light
Having been quite pleased with the imagery above, I decided to try inverting my prism images. I was pleasantly surprised at the results. The ‘Ai’ generated motion worked particularly well. I did not direct the ‘Ai’ to produce anything, instead I allowed the ‘Ai’ to interpret the seed images as it saw fit. It is clear from some of the motion that the software was clearly trying to make some kind of ‘sense’ of what was being presented. Please note all of the stills from this experiment are very ‘quick and dirty’ shots for pure experimentation.
Original Stills Inverted
Evaluation and Conclusion
I was quite pleased with the results of the image to video animations above. I felt that the stark black and white imagery and the colourful lights had been picked up very well in the video generations. There are a myriad of opportunities that these short video pieces can offer. The image to video generations are just the beginning of the journey. Moving forward I would like to separate out some of the generated stills. However I have an even better idea. I ran a series of animation workshops a few years ago and the ‘penny has just dropped’. I think I know exactly where I’m going now with this for my next block of experimentation – TBC….