There’s been a lot of kerfuffle in the art world as of late about the ethics and capabilities of
AI art (previously), and
as Britain’s leading institution for contemporary art, you seem like just the right people to bring
it to the public. My proposal is simple, but effective — let man and machine compete on equal
footing.
Eight or so talented human artists will be given a prompt to work from. At the same time, the same
prompt will be given to a state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm, like Midjourney or Stable
Diffusion. In the gallery, the two works — one made by metal, one made by flesh — will be hung side
by side, and the audience will not be told which is which.
Next to each diptych will sit two bins where visitors can dispense plastic tokens (like the ones
they have at Asda) to vote on which painting is their favourite. At the end of the exhibition’s run
(or perhaps updating live; your call), the votes will be tallied up, and we’ll finally find out
whether us or our creations are the better artists.
If you really wanted to provoke, you could ask the humans to provide you with a list of every
painting they’ve ever seen, every photo they’ve ever taken, every film they’ve ever watched, and
every song they’ve ever heard. Then you put that big list up on the wall, tell the visitors that
Advanced Biological Neural Learning Algorithms have taken quote-unquote “inspiration” from all of
these copyrighted works, and put to vote whether you should contact the rightsholders and ask them
to sue. It would be only fair.
Chære and regards, Xanthe. P.S. — I am not a crackpot.
I included this photo to show that the gallery still makes plenty of room for the “old masters”
— but, to be honest with you, it sums up everything i dislike about some renaissance and baroque
art. Just a huddled mass of mythological figures, with no life, no colour, no attention paid to
the greater picture. Sad!
Manchester is not particularly renowned as a home for the aristocracy or patrons of the high arts,
so i was pleased to discover upon a visit that the
Manchester Art Gallery is one of the finest of its
kind.
The Mag (as nobody calls it)’s success lies not in the size of its collection — it’s no larger than
my local, the Laing — but in its presentation. Like many museums, its curators have lately been
making efforts to diversify their collections and make them more relatable to the average yoof of
today. It’s a process that can often come off as haphazard and rushed1, but
the team at the Mag have pulled it off with care and respect.
Berni Searle, In Wake Of, 2014.
Newer works are dotted in each gallery in such a way that they complement, rather than denigrate,
the greats of old. A visa rejection letter from a group of Pakistani artists hangs alongside
Victorian paintings of eastern caravans; where a gallery about protest and revolution could have
added some shrewd, vapid letterpress and called it a day, the museum’s curators have instead chosen
to incorporate a thoughtful self-portrait by a South African painter, made in the wake of the
Marikana massacre.2
The captions accompanying each artwork face a similarly complicated task. Be too conservative and
you’ll disappear up your own arse into a world of romanticist masturbation; be too reactionary and
you’ll come off as cloyingly didactic, engaging in pseudohistoric iconoclasm for iconoclasm’s sake.
The Mag hit a stroke of genius here: after a brief description in the typical style, the captions
adorning prominent works also include conversations and thoughts from a variety of perspectives, be
it historians, curators, or the artists themselves. It’s a brilliant way to further inform the
visitor without beating them over the head with one opinion, alienating them with arcane academese,
or leaving out unsavoury histories.
Someone, please, tell me what this painting is called. I have to know.
Other highlights on the lower floors include a portrait of the early black tragedian Ira Aldridge
(the very first work in the museum’s collection, which rather surprised me coming from the people of
1858), a Ghanaian tapestry that i was surprised to learn was actually made of glass, and a lovely
painting of an industrial scene lit by hazy fog whose name — to current me’s infuriation — i
neglected to include in the photo, taken from an angle so inconvenient that reverse image search
returns nothing of relevance. Past me is a bastard and i’m killing him when i get the chance.
Upstairs sit the gallery’s temporary exhibitions. The most prominently advertised was on the topic
of the history of men’s fashion, something i regrettably could not get myself to muster up any
interest in. I’m sure it’s quite interesting if that’s your sort of thing. The other (smaller)
exhibition sits in a surprisingly grand hall which, from what i can tell, normally houses the
museum’s pottery galleries, and it’s about tea. No wait come back i sw—
I jest, but there really is some fascinating stuff in there. The room’s cabinets are packed with
advertisements, old jugs, and all sorts of other things detailing how hot drinks have shaped Britain
and the world over the years — from sparking conversation to funding colonisation. But there was one
thing that stuck out to me the most. A newly-created work of art, perhaps meant to inspire some
thought or another in the viewer, but that our whole group agreed could only be described as one
thing:
Buttplug dreamcatcher.
PS: I had to ask what the abbreviation “dbl” (“double”) on the signs for
upcoming trams meant. My poor exurban soul simply could not comprehend the idea of a transit system
that consistently ran so punctually — i had been thinking it stood for something like
“delayed by late”.
PPS: This was meant to be the last post in the series, but my rambling
about the gallery got so out of hand that i thought i’d spin off its intended complement into its
own part. Tune in next week3 for one last dispatch from Affleck’s Palace.
I recently bought 1000 images’ worth of credits on DreamStudio — a machine-learningα-powered art generator — on a whim and, after the requisite “Boris Johnson taking a bath of baked
beans” joke entries, i thought it would be an interesting test to get it to generate some images for
my shrines (on- and offline).
Just typing in “God” brought a fascinating cavalcade of interpretations — some clearly Hellenic,
some Christian, some taking more inspiration from the dharmic faiths, and the occasional
completely abstract depiction.
My motivations were twofold: first, due to copyright constraints, all of the icons adorning these
shrines were either old baroque paintings or freely-licenced photos of even older marble statues,
which didn’t necessarily represent my mental image of the Gods’ appearances — a topic which, of
course, will vary massively from artist to artist and culture to culture. Second, i thought it would
be a fascinating experiment to see how this machine learning algorithm, which has taken in hundreds
upon thousands (perhaps millions; i’ve not checked) of images, views the Gods in its latent space.
Just as it has a prototypical idea of a “dog” and a “cat”, surely it also has one for “God” and
“Dionysos”.
As is tradition, we begin this article with Hestia (although Her
portrait was actually the final one to be generated). On the broad strokes, my computer collaborator
knocked it out of the park — but a closer look reveals some glaring imperfections in the face and
hands, a theme which we’ll be seeing a lot of (and which i sometimes managed to harness to my
advantage).
I should note that i’m not just feeding it theonyms with no added context: the programme works best
if you help it along to your goal with a heaping of adjectives and descriptors, say, to tell it that
this is indeed meant to be an artwork (“4K ultra
HD”, “trending on ArtStation”), the details of the pose and background
you want (“blonde hair”, “raising His hand to the sky”), or the style and artists you want it to
take from (“baroque painting by Thomas Cole”, a prominent painter of beautiful, well-lit
landscapes). If you calibrate it just right, it can make some genuinely beautiful stuff, like the
above picture of Apollon (which i did, admittedly, have to manually
touch up to get rid of a prominent Habsburg chin).
It may be an immensely powerful tool, but DreamStudio can also be rather prudish.β
It blurs out any images it thinks might contain the utterly offensive sight of the genitalia with
which we are all born, which can be a real problem if the relevant pictures it’s learnt from are all
Greek and Roman statues — not exactly works known for their nether modesty. The detection software
isn’t perfect, though, and sometimes, like in this portrait of Gæa, it
lets a few slip past (perhaps because of the greenish tone with which i instructed itγ
to portray Her skin).
The algorithm sometimes has issues with more complex prompts, for it is just a machine, and doesn’t
actually understand that “ball on top of a red box” means that the ball indeed should be on
top of the box, as opposed to by its side, beneath it, or fused together in a horrific amalgam.
These troubles somewhat manifested themselves in the above portrait of Hermes; the winged cap He is
traditionally depicted with has transformed itself into both a crown and a hulking pair of soaring,
fleshy wings emanating from His shoulders, and the recognisable caduceus has been reduced to a
bamboo stick by His side.
Perhaps it’s just the style i instructed it to paint in — sixteenth-century European paintings
aren’t renowned for their diversity — but DreamStudio also has some real trouble with darker skin
tones. You can cry “dark skin, dark bronze skin, dark skin, dark skin, dark skin, black”
all you want, but the only thing that can consistently get it to generate anything a shade below the
average Spaniard is “African American”, which tends to bring along a heap of other associated
physical changes besides just skin tone. (I have to say, i don’t particularly envision Hermes as the
eponymous Futurama character in my head.)
It also has quite some trouble with arms and legs. Originally, i thought of its odd morphings and
multiplications as a bug to be stamped out, but i came to see them as a feature, representing the
manifold, varied aspects of the Gods, their omnipresence, transcending the limits of human form.
(This is also why the Hindus do it, if i recall correctly.)
I would have rather the above portrait of Hermaphroditos been slightly
more, ah, gynomorphic around the chest, so to speak, but i’d been trying to get a decent pose for
what felt like an hour and i didn’t feel like fighting the blur anymore.
So then — it’s a bit off in places, and lacks the leopard-skin toga i would have liked, and lord
knows what the objects He’s holding are meant to be, and it turned out the computer really, really,
struggled with the basic concept of a faun or satyr’s legs, but we end this post with DreamStudio’s
interpretation of an icon of Dionysos, framed by some beautiful
landscape.
Navigating through the neural net’s knowledge and limitations has been a fascinating, illuminating
exercise, which has left no doubt in my mind that “AI art” is, indeed,
just that: art. It seems to me much more comparable to something like photography than painting:
rather than doing the hard work by hirself with brush strokes and pencil lines, the artist guides
hir computer collaborator through latent space, pressing “click” when sie finds something appealing.
One can only hope the Muses would approve.
As the solstice arrives, the week winds down, and the days begin once more to lengthen, it’s
time for our final submission for this year’s Lords of Misrule. This one comes from an artist
known only as Newt S.For the last time this year, Io Saturnalia!
My sincerest thanks for everyone for participating this year. I wasn’t expecting a single
submission, let alone five of the bloody things.
Down a narrow alleyway to the back end of St Nicholas’ Cathedral, in Newcastle, one can find a
rather curious decoration garnishing a door on the opposing façade. The “vampire rabbit” has stood
watch over the cathedral for at least half a century; while records are scarce (a quick search of
Google Books doesn’t bring up anything until the twenty-first century), it could well date back to
the building’s construction in 1901.
Spooky.
Here’s a noticeably brighter bun, as it looked in 1987.
Here’s the thing, though. Nobody knows how it got there. Indeed, even the name “vampire rabbit” is a
misnomer; its jet-black fur and red claws were added on some time in the 1990s,i
as were its distinctly batty ears. Some say it was put there to scare away wannabe graverobbers, but
i have my doubts that twentieth-century crooks would be so dumb.
Yet others posit that it represents a
mad March hare, arising at the time
of Easter, or that it refers to Thomas Bewick, a nearby engraver who had a fondness of all things
lagomorphic. Most fascinatingly,
a theory advanced by one Mr Adam Curtis
suggests a Masonic pun in reference to one George Hare Phillipson, a local doctor (hence
vampires) and active Freemason, as was the lead architect, one William H. Wood. It being a secret
society in-joke would also explain why it’s located around the back, rather than the front, which
faces onto one of the busiest streets in town.
Perhaps we might never know for sure. In any case, it’s a fascinating little secret — what do you
think is most likely?
I don't know how
somepeople do it,
posting almost every day. I suppose my life just isn’t interesting enough for this sort of thing!
Anyway. I was going to write up a full post about a recent jaunt to
Lady Waterford Hall, but my memory
is awful and i’m not sure that it would be very interesting. Instead, here are some photos
from the trip:
Pointing towards the gift shop.
“The Student”. This photo’s a bit more potato-y than the rest, because it was behind a glossy
frame…
(If you’d like to visit, admission is free with a suggested donation of £3, and the place is
wheelchair-accessible.)
