Where Ai Isn’t? –

At the moment it feels as if the tentacles of Ai text to image are reaching further and further into our artistic lives. As artists this poses both opportunities and threats.  Opportunities come from the ease of image to text generation.  Threats arise from the ‘cheapening’ of images, as anyone can produce beautiful imagery at the touch of a button.

The whole Ai text to image debate has certainly changed my approach to working.  I am now very mindful that anything I produce can be easily replicated with little or no creative input.  In order to combat this I began to think about scenarios where Ai text to image in the art world is not yet fully residing.  Some of these areas included:

• Where human interaction is required to initiate a response.
• Where photography is used as a historical tool for accurately representing the past
• The documentation of time as in time lapse photography
• In art and craft based physical structures
• In the unseen or the hidden (if Ai can’t see it, how can it replicate it?).

The first area on the list was where human interaction was required to initiate a response.  I have often wondered how my oil on water images would react if I could feed sound into them.  What would any distortions look like?  Would negative sounds distort my images in a visually negative way and vice versa?  At the time of writing (although it’s a rapidly changing landscape), and to the best of my knowledge Ai isn’t yet predicting what someone is about to say. Therefore I felt that this would be a good starting point.

Unfortunately I am not a computer programmer and I have absolutely no idea how to work with sounds that would affect imagery.  However I came across a visual node based programming language called ‘Touch Designer’ which allegedly could help non programming artists bring their creations to life. ‘Touch Designer’ is a node based language and all of the reviews say that it is very difficult to learn.  It does make for amazing imagery!

This left me with a dilemma – do I take a massive risk and move away from my tradition practice of creative photography? Or do I stagnate by  sitting back on the sidelines as Ai moves further and further into my creative territory?  I decided to ‘bite the bullet!’  I began working with a number of ‘Touch Designer’ tutorials and below are some of the results that I produced.

The first video to show on the slider is a generative art piece using the alphabet.  This was created from a ‘Touch Designer tutorial.  The second piece is a generative art piece using an existing movie and changing it.  The third piece is one of my movies that is reacting to sound.  The sound is a song by ‘Brian Mcfadden’  appropriately titled ‘Real to Me’.

Conclusion

There is huge risk embarking on a journey to understand coding.  The learning curve as a non programmer is huge! However the results can be amazing!  The results below are very interesting (almost mesmerising), but in terms of my style of work are they are complete failures.  Then again, they were only ever designed to be a means to an end.  Hopefully what comes after is what will count.  In the meantime enjoy 😊

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