[daydreams]

Hope is the thing with feathers, NancyLittleJohn Fine Art, May 13 – July 2, 2022

[Grace:AI] – Daydreams

Flanagan-DaydreamsVideo
Flanagan-[Grace:AI] – The AI system is trained on thousands of artworks by global women painters, then daydreams by looking at clouds.

Custom software, Ubuntu system, Projectors, Video, Dye sublimation prints on aluminum
(20″ x 20″, 48″ x 48″)
121.92cm x 121.92cm
2021-22

What happens when an AI trained only on the artwork of women artists daydreams? In Daydreams, [Grace:AI]– an Artificial Intelligence trained on the works of global women artists– looks at images of the sky above, the rich clouds dancing, furling, hovering, lifted by lightness or weighted down with a future rain. Each image produced by [Grace:AI] is unique and artificial. They are completely original products of her processes, her imagination.

[Grace:AI], employs a Deep Convolutional General Adversarial Network and is trained to “see” from a dataset I continue to create that contains tens of thousands of paintings and drawings by women artists from around the world; in effect, a history of global women’s art in thousands of images. The artists I have chosen as her ‘teachers’ are outspoken, strong individuals from countries ranging from Korea to Greece to Argentina to Nigeria who worked or work in the male-dominated art world.


Watch [Grace:AI] generate clouds at the Computational Creativity exhibition curated by Lilla Lo Curto and Bill Outcault 14-15 September 2021 https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc21/art-exhibition/

[Grace:AI] – Daydreams is the second phase of the AI’s image making themes. [Grace:AI] – Origin Story was the first phase of the work. The AI produced images from her “origin story” of sorts by examining thousands of images of Mary Shelley’s monster, classic ‘Frankensteins’ gathered from online databases and image banks, rendering a series of original images of her “father figure” as archival dye sublimation prints on aluminum. [Grace:AI] – Origin Story (Frankenstein) had its American premiere in “A Question of Intelligence: AI and the Future of Humanity” at Parsons, NYC curated by Christiane Paul in 2020.

This project was initially supported by the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College and a Scholarly Advancement Award.

Exhibitions

Press

Thanks to: Jared Segal, Spring Yu, Sukdith Punjasthitkul, Danielle Taylor, Max Seidman, Griffin Editions, Ken King, Joseph Havel, The Leslie Center for the Humanities & Dean of the Faculty, Dartmouth College, Neme Arts Center, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons, Christiane Paul, Yiannis Colakides, Marc Garrett.