Second Generation selfportrait

 A lot of people on the Internet express the opinion that artist will go extinct because of #AIart. I am not one of them.

AIart Selfportarit of Artist on the Beach
(Style tranfer of a photo using a stable diffusion reference)

The current crop of text to image neural networks can be quite amazing, very good at capturing style, colouring and texture aspects of artistic mark making. Not so good at expressing an artist intent, specifically originality. Unfortunately, most of the current neural networks I’ve been trained up on rather depressing and dystopian art and images. I’m not sure that this is really the direction of art, more to do with the wasteland of trends on social media, where most images are found these days. Further so much depends on how you express yourself in the text prompt and modifiers. Will poets become the new visual artists?  Further it’s become common practice to keep refining the image and prompt. This is a lot like building up glazes or over-painting, creating layers of added texture and form and more eye appeal.

Already I can see that the simple first attempt text string output on social media from any of the AIart systems around at the moment, looks much the same, not quite right, unusually cropped and frequently scarily dystopian. Hopefully those jumping on the “one-click” filter style of social media influencer posts will soon become bored with the method. Leaving those interested in the potential for artistic expression time to experiment and refine methods. Thereby expanding the range of tools and media they have to hand. I for one look forward to this time.

The Surreal Painting

This time I am paying homage to a surrealist artist, Rene Magritte, whose man in the bowler hat was made popular again in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. I believe his canvas on the easel that disappears into the scene behind is called The Human Condition. The idea of being able to see through the current situation to the world outside appeals to me during the COVID-19 social isolation period.

To make this picture I took a couple of photos, one with a canvas and one with no canvas. I have a nifty remote control for my little Olympus so you can't see me triggering the shot with my right hand by my side.  Rather than try to do a blended image I used the cloning and context sensitive retouch tools in On1 instead, to cover the window frame and easel where the picture would been.

Artist with Idol

I know yet another self portrait, but this pays homage the the Post Impressionist Artist Gaugain and his "Self Portrait with Idol". I was trying to capture the mood and lighting rather than strict copy of the pose, and that required a fair bit of turning on and off the lights (all standard lights in my home) and shift the mask from New Guinea around a bit.

I don't have any dark walls so I had to live with the lighter background, which makes the mask standout a bit. more ominous and his cowrie shell eye stand out. I also did some double processing of my image in On1. First I took the RAW file and darkened it somewhat and lifted the contrast a little.Finally using a warm cinematic colour grading look (CG12 for the ON1 folk). I then saved this as a Tiff file (to keep the dynamic range). I reloaded that and added a vignette and a subtle canvas texture overlay before exporting to the final Jpeg.

Definitely not a master piece but fun to do. I guess this #StayAtHome project has morphed from surrealist portrait into #artinspired self-portraits, such is life during a "lockdown".

More Ethereal than Surreal

Today's photo is another heavily post processed contribution, in fact it is using the one-click style filters that I generally dislike. However... ... you'll never know if you don't give it a go... This image (I'm not going to say it is still a photo) was completely created on my phone. Starting with a way to close selfie, then I used an app called Porta to generate the watercolour style feel with faded edges.

I'm not sure how the blood shot eye effect arose but it suits the apprehensive and ethereal mood. (My eye isn't blood shot at all).

Surreal-ly into a Deep Dream

This was an accidental selfie. I was in my favourite spot for the afternoon light beside TheWindow. I stopped to finish my coffee, right in the shadow of the door frame, and didn't realize I set off the self-timer on my camera from my phone. The actual photo was lame but I decided to try it out in Google Deep Dream Generator, using a "modern art" style pattern.

I think the results are somewhere avant garde 1920ish.

A Surreal Selfie #photoproject

Le Violon d'Ingres

I got inspired whilst looking through Man Ray's photos (I was looking for but never found his Jazz series). He was a Dada &/or Surrealist artist and photographer who came to fame in Paris in the 1920's & 30's. His most famous image from that time is probably Ingre's Violin, but he was also a very successful fashion photographer and filmmaker after the war.

“It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.”

...Man Ray

The object here is to take a "self portrait" (it doesn't have to include your face, could be just a shadow, an empty chair, your hands holding a camera, or a coffee cup!) that tells much more of your story than a standard head-shot selfie. What story do you want to tell? Perhaps it will be about your aspirations, what you have achieved, what you want to do after lockdown is over?

The Clone Selfie

This is a preliminary test for my entry into the National Portrait Gallery's Digital Portraiture Award 2016.

This is a video of a set of tripod selfies taken in front of one of my art works (the Holocene Mass Extinction). They have been processed through google’s deep dream generator trained on a number of Archibald prize finalist’s paintings.

The self portraits remain in essence images of me but they borrow, approximate and draw on other artist’s mark making via appropriation from artificially intelligent neural networks.

Letting myself have a more creative eye

I have been thinking more about what I might do creatively than about the themes of my daily photos. This week’s Friday photo is about eyes and the subject is very predictable. My eye is already in lots of photos so I was trying to think outside the oval/almond, or whatever shape my eye is. I began by using my camera on a tripod teathered to my computer via lightroom amd taking photos a regular intervals so all I had to do is get close to the camera and look deeply into its lens. This is a pretty simple way to get a self portrait, that I hadn’t tried before. Its easy ad works well. None of the photos where all that remarkable but I like a couple with me looking over my glasses, I enhance this one in the develop moduloe since I was already in lightroom. The only unusual step was I reduced clarity (so as not to make the skin to crunchy). I then loaded this image into the web version of dreamscope and played with a few likely looking filters.

Once I had the original photo and a set of “arty” renderings built from it. I then loaded the seleceted photo and a few of the better filtered imaged into OnOne Layers. the filtered on top of the photo. It was then just a case of loading a mask, inverting it and then painting out around eyes. so the eyes are phoyograpohic while the rest of the portrait becomes an artwork. Finally adding a border, lots of fun and not hard to do.

See the PhotoFriday contribution below.