I created a moodboard which is looking at some different artists for inspiration in style within concept art – All of these are done digitally however I generally work in physical medium so I will most likely be creating my final pieces on physical medium.

Dan Peacock – Feng Zhu – Cam Sykes – Noah Bradley – Simon Stalenhag

I am also looking at number of different artists who inspire my own practise in oil painting – Mostly surrealism artists who fit into the space of my research project and explore strange imagery.

These are artists which have inspired me for years as an artist

James Jean

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Jaroslaw Janikowski

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Tiffany Bozic

And my two personal all time favourite artists

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Salvador Dali

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M C Escher

Pictoplasma is a great book on character design which has an interesting range of strange characters.

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When looking at this image above I thought about different ways I could make use of AI in a collaborative sense – For example with something like the the body could be drawn by me and the heads could be made by the computer. In this sense my aspect is the ‘real’ and the computer is the fantasy aspect in the surrealism.

It could even work like exquisite corpse where I draw one part and the computer draws the rest based on where it was left off

More interesting character drawings – I could imagine these drawn from computer generated imagery as a starting point.

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I decided an interesting way to explore creating with AI in terms of character design would be to create a sheet of silhouettes based on generated shapes.

Researching reference, looking to create something along the lines of this. A silhouette sheet is a great way to quickly iterate different character shapes.

Generated shapes laid out.

Drawing overtop with vivid – I found it quite a difficult process to create something in the shapes without any definition.

Interesting to note that these look quite like pokemon characters before being unlocked.

After talking with Tanya about the direction of my project we decided that it needs more context to give some meaning behind the artworks, rather than just creating for nothing. I decided to spin my project towards a concept art approach – how could I use AI to help create a fantasy world and creatures/characters.

One of the works I have been particularly interested in during my research is Tristan Schulze’s ‘Equilibrium’, a performance work in which he acted ‘as’ the code and drew illustrations on a wall based on instructions.

The information online was quite vague in terms of the process, so I sent an email to get some more insight into the process.

Sounds great. Here we go:

> What are the rules and conditions that you works under, and how did you
> decide on them?

They came actually from the very basic drawing process with inkpen or with brush and ink. I was wondering what the transformation of the simple line in rotation, curve, dotting,… can create in respect to create a more complex form. I come from computational background, so there you often work with loops of rules and conditions. So this is what i translated into some analog manner. It came along, that some simple rules i created on the fly made me create interessting shapes and patterns, i could have never planned. – 

in practice it was like this: 

#1
first i doodled something on sidepaper as soon as an interesting “Rhythm” appeared. 

#2
Then i tried to describe it with rules like this: 
– : draw a short line from top to bottom, 
– : rotate around 2 degree
– : draw next line (loop)
– : if next line will hit another line, rotate paper around 180 degree and find a new anchor around your last entry 

#3 occasionally i developped a bunch of rules for each piece to mix them up. 

> How much freedom did you allow yourself to stay from these rules?

As soon as you have some kind of ruleset to draw after, there will be situations you are stuck – either the drawing will look boring or too chaotic. To balance this is quiet a challenging part. I try to stick to the ruleset as tight as possible, but if it gets to dense, i often quit to work on that specific area to work somewhere else. After a while or while paper rotation, the puzzle solved itself quiet often. – i also updated the rulesets to suit the new needs and fit the old needs too. 

> How did visitor input influence the process?

It was a bit like a strange camping trip. The guys from the gallery were there quiet often and we drank a lot. I had a childrens group in the room an one really strange oldschool techno guy. I liked they visited the place and the accompany. From the performing artist perspective it was quiet disturbing. Next time i like to close it up totally to see what happens. 

> Would you say that the process limited or enhanced your creativity? Was it
> a rewarding artistic experience?

I like it a lot, when i write a program, that surprises me. This is really rewarding. The same is with the drawing. Not only as a visual product, but also from what i experience with it. It is not quiet like meditation – it is different –  it needs a lot of focus but on the same time you have the feeling you dig out something yet unknown. It is also challenging – if you are not awake, then you run into boring results. That is also what i also like about the chinese ink – you cant remove it – so every line it set.

It is fun to think these performances through. I think i will do another somewhere. In the moment i focus more to the digital side but I think that the body is a very central part in how we percieve rythm, aetsthetics – how exactly? i your have a glimpse – hihi!

I hope my answers are somewhat helpful for you?

Many greetings from Leipzig

Tristan  

I found this quite intriguing although still a bit difficult to follow.

Some relatively unsuccessful attempts at emulating the technique he used:

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Over the break I have been working to develop my project further from where I left at proposal. Some tasks I set myself were to develop the code aspect further and develop more drawings in exploration.

I tried a different technique for developing the shapes – this one creates a random closed polygon shape with varying number of sides.

Some randomly generated shapes – this time I just went with whatever the computer decided rather than trying different ones until I saw something.

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Drawing over top into something.

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I found this exercise quite interesting as everyone seemed to see something different in the shapes each time – when I asked my parents what they saw in the shapes it was quite different to my initial interpretation.

The future of illustration lies within the power of Artificial Intelligence. Untapped imagination potential can be unlocked by embracing chance in co-creation with AI, enhancing creativity within illustration.

The difficult process of creative and imaginative thinking can be explored alongside artificial intelligence by unpacking theories in the art movements of Conceptual artists, Conditional designers and Surrealists. Conceptual artists and Conditional designers both conceptualise a method of working in which the idea and process behind a work are more important than the finished work. Embracing rules and constriction within the process can stimulate creativity in an unexplored way. The surrealists believed that the power of imagination was constrained by the rational mind. Only by embracing chance and allowing the subconscious to take control could the true potential be unlocked. 

These theories can be applied within illustration, using the power of Artificial intelligence to access a new ‘plane’ of thinking which allows for unexpected creation. Could the concept of unlocking imagination manifest itself in co-created illustration techniques with the computer, where the machine brain takes the place of the subconscious? 

In a rapidly expanding and technologically advancing world, artificial intelligence has already reached superhuman capabilities in some tasks and is on a path towards true machine creativity. This incredible advancement has opened up a whole new space full of untapped creativity and imagination for creative minds. Currently, the computer is primarily relegated to use as a tool for creation, controlled by the human. By employing co-creation methods and embracing the idea of chance when illustrating along-side the machine, new levels of creativity and imagination can already be achieved with current technology. Collaboration with Artificial Intelligence allows an unexplored and unpredictable method of working in this way which can enhance Illustration. 

If the computer was able to think creatively like a human (or even beyond) and was allowed equal freedom and contribution, could this foster an unimaginable new level of creativity? 

To create the poster I wanted it all drawn on rather than printed, to go with the theme of computer/illustration collaboration. I was going to use the laser cutter to ‘draw’ all the lines and text on using a pen – Unfortuantly I didnt have access to that and couldn’t get it in time as It was a last minute discision.

So I decided to instead transfer all the lines and text and draw them on manual by hand… a time consuming process indeed.

Progression, from transfering, to pen, and finally some light ink rendering to add some depth.

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Overall I am quite happy with how it turned out. As horrible as the process was, I am glad that I did all of it by hand. It was interesting to see how everything changed slightly as I interpreted it through the various stages of copying to the final pen layer.

For my proposal poster I wanted to give the computer agency by allowing it to decide the composition.

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I first adapted the program in order to add a bit more variance in the generation, and also limited it so that it wouldn’t draw off the screen.

I then took the generation into illustrator and played around with a few different techniques – I wanted to simplify the form down as the original generation had a lot of lines which would be difficult to draw. However I also wanted the interpretation to be done by the computer.

On the left – Image trace which interprets images into shapes/lines, usally used to make logos out of jpegs. On the right is the line simplify function. This joined some shapes and began to introduce curves, which I quite liked the look of.

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The simplify function could be run several times over for interesting results – much more dynamic curves.

A combination of the two created some intersting results…

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I decided on a final generatin for my poster and tried laying out some text based on the room that was decided by the computer.

After much internal debate… I chose to crop in on the generation so it went off the page – I thought that made for a much more interesting compostion. I did however recognise that this was stripping some control from the computer which I did not like…

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After my talk with Lee around surrealism I had a look into the concept of chance and all the different theories and techniques that were developed from the movement.

I found some very interesting perspectives and techniques around the power of imagination and creativity. Many of the surrealists believed that the rational mind repressed the power of imagination. They believed that in order to unlock the power of imagination they needed to access their subconscious and allow a loss of conscious control over the process.

The concepts behind surrealists was influenced by psychologist Sigmund Freud.

One technique developed is ‘Automatic drawing’ in which the user draws without conscious control – allowing the subconscious to show through.

Exquisite Corpse – A drawing game played by surrealists in order to collaborate and embrace chance for intriguing and unimaginable results. This game involves drawing a body part each, folding the paper each time the next starts in order to conceal what was previous drawn. I was surprised to find the origins of this game as this is something that I think a vast majority of children have played at some point. I even have an example of one I did with my friends at a party pinned to my wall, and yet I never knew that the origins lie within my most beloved art movement – Surrealism.

I find these concepts all incredibly engaging and fascinating and I began to think about applying these in regards to my project. What if the computer could act as this ‘subconscious’ part of our brain, in order to unlock the artist’s true potential of imagination? Or could the computer prompt the user is such a way that they were able to access this state?
I also thought about the idea behind exquisite corpse, and imagined a version in which it is played with the computer. A process which has much more back and forth between man and machine would be an incredibly valuable experience.