Hidden Away – During my recent trip to Barcelona, I was was mesmerised by the colour and variety of the street art both in and around the city. I briefly touched on this in part one of this post called ‘Barcelona Graffiti’. I still don’t know exactly why I was so drawn to the graffiti (street art), except to say that the colours were amazing! It seemed to relentlessly permeate throughout the whole fabric of the city, weaving a disjointed tapestry of colours. Indeed it could even be described in some places as a riot of colour on an otherwise typical traditional cityscape and its walls. All of this was in stark contrast to the walls of one of Barcelona’s most famous contemporary art museums, namely the MACBA. Here there was no graffiti. Everything inside was pristine with beautiful gleaming white walls. A Short Recap Below is short video recap from Barcelona Graffit part one. It helps to illustrate the scale of graffiti and street art that can be found in and around the city. In stark contrast to the brightly coloured graffiti in the video above, the following image gallery illustrates the crisp, clean, neutral […]
Refik Anadol Inspired Responses At the beginning of this project I began to examine the possibilities created by Ai generated imagery. I likened Ai to something that had tentacle-like structures. I imagined that these tentacles were expanding and steadily weaving their way into all aspects of our lives. After discovering the work of Refik Anadol, It is clear to see that Ai generated imagery and data visualisation are becoming firmly rooted in the art world. The work of Refik Anadol is truly breathtaking. He is clearly a pioneer in the field of digital art. Below is a video containing examples of his work along with an interview with him talking about his art. Refik Anadol – His Work and Thoughts about Ai Generated Imagery Art Piece Responses to Refik Anadol In his interview Refik makes references to the futuristic classic film ‘Blade Runner’. Through his work he imagines what Ai might look like when it is dreaming. He affords human like qualities to the machine learning that he is observing. Following this line of thinking I wanted to imagine what Ai might look like as it grows and then dies. The following pieces are […]
Has Ai Killed Art? – Ai or Artificial Inteligence/Machine Learning has been around for a while now, but never has it’s presence been more keenly felt than in and around the Creative Arts. Producing imagery was once the domain of illustrators and graphic designs. Now it appears that everyone with a computer/tablet/smartphone and a connection to Dalle and Midjourney can produce the most amazing images. At first as a photographer I didn’t feel particularly threatened by ai. I suspected that what I was producing was safe for a while and that everyone would always need good photographers? As a simple test I ran a text prompt through Midjourney – a text to image ai generator. The results to me seemed less than impressive. Below is an example of what I do and what ai thinks I do. To generate the image below I used the text prompt “Oil on Water”. I decided to give the ai a second attempt. Although the result was better, it was still significantly different from the kind of imagery that I was producing. Below is the second time I ran the prompt ‘oil on water’. Fortunately or unfortunately depending upon a […]
