LO 1 – My Inspiration

Before taking this course, I did not come across, at least to my knowledge, a lot of computational art. One area of computational art that I have heard of is generative portraits. These pieces of art use an algorithm to create graphic elements that as a whole, represent a portrait. Since I did not know of a specific artist or project that focused on this form of art before this course, I found one artist to speak about. Sergio Albiac, a generative artist, made a project where he used images taken by the Hubble space telescope and created generative portraits by placing a series of circles on top of them. I am not sure how long it took to create the algorithm that made the images, but I know that the project ran from June 2013 to March 2014. During this time, he allowed participants to submit images that would eventually be turned into portraits (he made 15,000 portraits over the course of these ten months). I don’t know the exact software that this artist used, but they did not mention any custom software/scripts, so I imagine it was “off-the-shelf”. A large purpose of this project was to allow for the creation of art in a fast manner. It was not a matter of quantity over quality, but Sergio Albiac felt as though there are pieces of work that are not created due to a limitation of resources of all kinds, and that the ability to create for the sake of an exploration of potential creations was the driving force behind this project. With this at the core of why Sergio creates, I think that this creates a great opportunity for exploration to create what may not have been made.

Link to project:
https://www.sergioalbiac.com/wall/stardust.html