NCS
—
In 2018, Christie’s held its first public sale for a murals produced by synthetic intelligence (AI), which offered for $432,500.
But Hong Kong-based cross-media artist Victor Wong didn’t suppose the portray — which seems to be like a blurry oil portray of a person — was something that revolutionary. “It totally mimics human work, it wasn’t something different,” he stated.
So the inventive — who has a level in electrical engineering and whose work spans film particular results, artwork tech installations, and sculpture, amongst different artwork kinds — determined to make one thing distinctive.
His creation, AI Gemini, is an AI-driven robotic that creates traditional Chinese panorama paintings — the “first-ever artificial intelligence ink artist in the world,” in accordance to 3812 Gallery, which represents Wong. (AI Gemini has no relation to Google’s generative AI chatbot of the identical title).
It makes use of a robotic arm, bought on-line and re-programmed, with an hooked up paintbrush. An algorithm interprets information units of Wong’s selecting, directing the robotic arm to color mountain contours to kind a panorama on Xuan paper, a skinny rice paper historically used for portray.
One collection of paintings, impressed by China sending a lunar rover to the far facet of the moon, used data from a public NASA 3D moon map. He’s additionally used information resembling inventory costs, the place the inventory index ups and downs might be interpreted as mountains and valleys, he says.
The software of colours is based mostly on deep studying and coaching in traditional ink panorama portray, and the quantity of water used is dependent upon adjustments in humidity, Wong explains. It takes about eight to 10 hours to provide a portray that’s one meter (about three toes) tall and broad, he provides.
Since Wong launched AI Gemini, he’s held exhibitions in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and London. He says his paintings have offered for round $20,000 to particular person collectors, and he’s labored on tasks for corporates like Hong Kong’s flagship airline Cathay Pacific.
Ink panorama paintings date again hundreds of years in China. Yet Wong says that by combining the concepts of people with the capabilities of know-how, he hopes to create “something that hasn’t been seen before.”
Innovation and artwork
The use of AI to create paintings is controversial. Earlier this 12 months, greater than 6,500 folks signed an open letter calling on Christie’s New York to cancel a sale devoted solely to artwork created with the know-how — the first of its kind for a serious public sale home. The sale, which went forward, introduced in $729,000.
Critics say that AI artwork lacks originality and artists complain that it’s based mostly on copyrighted photos.
Wong doesn’t straight use AI-generated photos. Instead of “training AI Gemini to copy the masters’ artwork” says Wong, he wrote an algorithm to imitate how the grasp’s work.
He says that the paintings he and AI Gemini create are authentic however provides that individuals attending his exhibitions will nonetheless typically exclaim, “It’s not art!”
Others are experimenting with combining robotics and artwork. A humanoid robotic named Ai-Da is prompted by AI to create a portray, and artist Sougwen Chung has educated robots to color with them on giant canvases.
Wong believes in innovation as a inventive pressure. “Technology and art have never been separated,” he says.
He factors to the invention of the paint brush — in China the software turned widespread in the course of the Han dynasty, which lasted from 206 BC to 220 AD — that enabled artwork kinds like calligraphy.
He provides that within the fifteenth century, artists together with Leonardo da Vinci used progressive methods like linear perspective, a mathematical system that makes use of a collection of converging traces to create perspective in drawings and paintings.
“The master always has a secret recipe to do their work,” he says. “They always use the latest technology at the time.”
Employing synthetic intelligence in artwork is merely a continuation of the development, he believes, and one which is inevitable.
“AI has become a part of life, and people still cannot really accept it, especially when it comes to art,” says Wong. But, he provides: “You cannot escape AI.”