Food for Thought – Page 4

Jan 30

by Karyn in Abstract Art, Ai, Animation, Context, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, Ideas, My Work, Videos 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, Animation, Evaluations, Food for Thought, Ideas, Videos

Morphing

Upping the Ante – ‘Time and time wait for no man’ Even within a short space of time the developments in ‘Ai’ assisted creative tools has been astounding! As soon as I realised that text to image was available I remembered my comments that it was only a matter of time before we had text to video. Indeed I wasn’t wrong. Apparently Google is already in a race with a number of other companies to achieve text to video. I have already seen for myself some of the early examples of this which are pretty impressive even at the beta stage. If you would like a pink and blue hippo skateboarding down the street with a banana on its head then you probably won’t have that long to wait. I generated the following text to video imagery. Looking at the videos, I particularly like the morphing effect generated by the software. However, what fascinated me more were the stills that I managed to pull from the Luminogram text to video ‘Ai’ driven generator. Hidden people and buildings seemed to pop in and out of nowhere. I like this idea of ‘hidden’ mysterious images. I have been researching around hidden things […]

Jan 17

by Karyn in Books, Drawings, Food for Thought, Hand Written, Handwriting, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings 0 comments tags: Books, Drawings, Food for Thought, Hand Written, Zentangles, Zoom Meetings

Zoom Session 12

Steal Like an Artist – For a long time now I have been aware that in the art and design world it is very difficult to find something that is completely new. There are elements borrowed from one piece of work that may be copied or changed to make a more exciting piece of work. Even in my own practice it feels like there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. I find there is nothing more frustrating to think I’ve found a great idea, only to research it and discover that actually I’m way ‘behind the curve’. However in today’s talk this became even more pronounced when we had some examples quoted from artist Austin Kleon’s book titled: ‘Steal like and Artist’. Kleon decided to research into his own style of art. He found that over the centuries there had in fact been not one but three other artists working in a similar way. These were namely Brian Gysin (1916 – 1986), Tristan Tzara (1896 – 1963) and Caleb Whitefoord (1734 – 1810). Apparently they had all been doing something similar. When this is seen across the ages it really does show that nothing at all is ever new. Indeed […]

Jan 16

by Karyn in Abstract Art, Ai, Ai Chat, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, My Work, Research, Videos 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, ai, Ai Chat, Evaluations, Experimentation, Food for Thought, Ideas, my work, Research, Videos

Conversations with Ai

Write Me a Program, A Poem and Then Some – Over the last few weeks I have spent a considerable amount of time researching generative art. I have looked at what it is, how to create it and the best tools to generate it. I have worked with a number of Touch Designer tools which are great for this and I’ve also looked at Processing which is a very popular creative coding tool. I’ve also created a Git Hub account and I’m currently learning all of the associated jargon so that I can look for potential collaborations. Although I have learned an incredible amount about programming, I am still not very conversant with it. I find that it does not make logical sense to me. However, that said, I am at the stage where I can more or less understand what a program is doing and I can amend variables accordingly. This is a massive step forward from only a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I might struggle to actually write a full program. This is where I wanted to test the limits of ChatGPT. This natural language simulator can produce code and I was curious to find out if […]

Jan 13

by Karyn in Ai, Ai Chat, Experimentation, Food for Thought, Ideas, Research, Workshops 0 comments tags: ai, Ai Chat, Experimentation, Food for Thought, Ideas, Research, Workshops

Ai Workshop

The Robots are Coming and They Are Dressed in Lace – I really enjoyed the workshop today called the ‘Robots are coming and They are Dressed in Lace’. I have discovered that I’m actually quite interested in ‘Ai’ text to image generators like Dalle-2 and Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. So any information, workshops, scholarly papers etc. are always most welcome. What I particularly liked about the session was the thinking behind it. Firstly, we were all introduced to Midjourney and how to use it. Luckily I was already used to using the software, so it was pretty easy to get started. However, producing images was only part of the exercise. Jonathan explained that once we had produced our images they needed to be added to a Google Docs page along with our names, the text prompts that we used to generate our images and how we felt about the results. At the end of the exercise all of the images along with their text prompts and creator information was printed out and put into a black archival quality box. We all know that because these tools are free it is probably fair to say, that we, as users are […]

Jan 10

Vilde Rolfsen – Inspired Work

Beautiful Destruction – For a few weeks now I have been wrestling with ideas for my research statement. Ideally I would like to integrate some form of current affairs or pressing agenda into my work but I wasn’t quite sure how to approach this. I then remembered a shoot I’d done a little while ago. I stumbled across an artist called Vilde Rolfsen. I found her plastic bag landscapes absolutely fascinating. Not only was her idea clever it was also visually very appealing. Her images are certainly creative. There’s just something special about taking such a mundane object like a plastic bag and transforming it into an amazing landscape. Below is a small gallery of her images. Vilde Rolfeson – Plastic Bag Landscape Responses to Vilde Rolfeson I felt that Vilde Rolfeson had produced something truly unique. However, inspired by her idea I wanted to use her imagery as a base to experiment further. I was also keen to incorporate elements of animation and time into my experimentation as this ties in heavily with my theme. Most of Vilde Rolefson’s plastic bag imagery is light and bright, therefore I decided to take a slightly darker approach. I wanted […]

Jan 03

by Karyn in Artists, Books, Culture, Food for Thought, Galleries, Ideas, Lectures 0 comments tags: Artists, Books, Culture, Food for Thought, Galleries, Ideas, Lectures

Dean Kenning Lectures

Summary of the Dean Kenning Lectures Term One Below are short summaries of the Dean Kenning Lectures that began this term Oct 2022. I will document these on a termly basis and include relevant slides. The Art and Politics of Statues 18/10/22 – This was the first lecture at the start of the term. I think that the key takeaway here was that sometimes it isn’t always appropriate to ‘hijack’ someone else’s cause because it could be seen as self serving self promotion. The case in point was the Marc Quinn ‘A Surge of Power’ (Jen Reid) erected 15th July 2020. Anti-racism protesters in England pulled down a statue of a 17th-century slave trader while demonstrating in solidarity with the US Black Lives Matter movement. Quinn surreptitiously erected the statue early on the morning of 15th July 2020. Although this would seem like an act of solidarity on his part as a white male, it raises questions about the true motivation behind it. Was Quinn simply trying to use a political situation in order to further his own career? Would it have been better to have community art erected instead of art from a white male already making a […]

Dec 29

Refik Anadol – Production and Destruction

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 […]

Dec 24

by Karyn in Artists, Research 0 comments tags: Abstract Art, Artists, Culture, Food for Thought, Galleries, Research

Henri Kalama

Monday Guest Lectures – Henri Kalama – was born and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he received his academic artistic training in painting. He later moved to China where he spent six years and completed a master in arts. Henri, relatively early on, has moved towards abstraction with a particular focus on colors, which he sees as a main channel for emotions. While he stills lives and works in the Congo, he is representative of a trend that aims to evolve from certain stereotypes in what is generally considered as “African” art. “Humanity is moving to a point of connection, a planet village, a boundless world – all of which I want to express with my work. The all connecting languages are music and art – both of which express and invoke feelings which everybody understands, no matter where they come from. The umbrella term which I use for my work is “cosmic vibrations”. I am convinced that there are some things – words, emotions and spirituality- that can’t be transmitted through human languages, but only through colors. Different tones of colors, to me, are the carriers of different feelings which can only be expressed through art […]

Dec 22

by Karyn in Artists, Research 0 comments tags: Artists, Culture, Food for Thought, Research, Sound

Trevor Mathison

Monday Guest Lectures – Trevor Mathison – is a founder member of Black Audio Film Collective, the award-winning documentary film group (Handsworth Songs, The March). He formed Dubmorphology with Gary Stewart in 2005. Culture critic Kodwo Eshun has hailed Mathison’s pioneering use of tape loops for their ability to make “the imperial anxieties of the early twentieth century resonate… with the multiple fears of the present.” Ashley Clarke, film journalist in his article ‘A Centrifugal Force: the magnetic sounds of Trevor Mathison’ for Sight and Sound magazine states: “His intricate work incorporates elements of dub and musique concrète“ Jean Fisher on Handsworth Songs 1987 describes: “a polyvocality of recorded testimonies and intercessional poetic voiceovers that, contrary to the ‘explanatory’ panoptical impulse of the documentary narrator, build an oblique relation to the audiovisual track.” Mark Fisher, “Trevor Mathison’s astonishing sound design certainly draws upon dub, but its voice loops and seething electronics are equally reminiscent of the work of Test Department and Cabaret Voltaire. Source: Trevormathison.com Take Away From The Talk Some notes from the talk: Collaborate with people. Trevor feels that working with people and maybe having a collective is really important. He feels it’s becoming harder to find artist […]

Dec 22

Too Cold!

Lissajous Curves and Cold Weather – I mentioned in an earlier blog that due to lack of disk space on my hosting package I would need to upgrade my hosting. This is always a tense time when moving files from one server to another. For this reason I needed to come up with a foolproof method of backing up my blog. In the past numerous backups have failed for me (files lost, media libraries lost, databases lost etc.), therefore I knew I couldn’t solely rely on this. However under my reflective planning it was on my todo list to think of an easy but effective way of getting around data loss. I came up with the idea of taking screenshots of my blog. This means that in the event of any data loss all I have to do is insert the screen shot and add any live links (genius!) and it works. Unfortunately when my blog was moved this particular post completely disappeared. However the process of taking a screen shot meant I can quickly post up images of the original post and add in the relevant link. Below is my original post added from screen shots. I’d […]