Hidden Art –
When I first began my MA, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do. Ultimately I knew it would be something to do with the hidden or the unseen.
Initially I began looking at invisible phenomena such as sound waves and the passage of time. However, nothing captured my interest quite as much as augmented reality. It was this whole concept of a hidden unseen world (only accessible to those ‘in the know’), that intrigued me.
While conducting research for my Research Paper I discovered that there is a distinct negative bias towards AI generated art. I looked at a number of strategies to help mitigate this bias. Finally, after a number of image polls, used to inform my project, I created a fictitious robot called Athena. Her name was inspired by the old Athena posters from the past. My research was suggesting that humanoid robots with a sad ‘backstory’ could help to reduce bias and win over an audience when presenting AI art.
At this point I began to develop a narrative for my robot. During a visit to Barcelona, I was completely amazed by the sheer weight of graffiti adorning the city walls. I photographed lots of it as I found it fascinating. In stark contrast to this were the beautiful pristine walls of Barcelona’s MACBA contemporary art museum. I wondered what something so human and so raw would look splashed all over the walls of the MACBA museum.
In essence, I had a myriad of ideas that I wanted to reconcile.
Important
I posed the question, what if humanity was going to introduce human art to an AI robot, then what medium might best represent the art of an ordinary person, i.e. the ‘man’ on the street? It was no good ‘feeding it’ Picasso and it was certainly no good ‘feeding it’ Davinci, Rodin or Turner. These fine artists were so talented that they could never ever be synonymous with art created by the masses.
In my opinion there is something very visceral and raw about graffiti. I acknowledge that it might not be a view shared by everyone. However, in the grander scheme of things it has a similar look and feel the whole world over. For this reason I decided to weave graffiti into the story.
On building my narrative I realised that because graffiti often has negative connotations it would probably never appear somewhere like the pristine walls of the MACBA Contemporary Art Museum. Could this also be true of AI generated art? Could it be that just like the graffiti (due to AI negative bias), Athena’s art would be shunned in the same way? I could feel a story beginning to build.
The trip to Barcelona afforded me a lot of material – and from it I managed to both self publish and augment 3 books. My journey into augmented reality also left me with a medium that I can use to hide artworks which satisfies my desire to hide things away.
Outcomes
There were a number of outcomes from the whole of my Unit 2 research and experiments. However, the piece above probably represents one of my favourites. It is important to point out that this piece is still at a very conceptual stage. The whole project was created on a smartphone! It shows the power of the little computer that each of us carries in our pocket. I do think the concept has potential.
Future developments
Time permitting, I would like to make the following amendments to the above piece.
- Shoot the piece using a higher quality camera such as a DSLR
- Design the animations so that they blend into the paper
- Take advantage of more animations with depth as they seem to sit inside of the pages adding a three dimensional look.
- Explore a wider variety of shooting angles
- Shoot the video so that the AI music generated for each animation can be heard.
