looking outwards – 06

Robbie Barrat – AI paintings

Robbie Barrat, a Stanford researcher, has become a cultural phenom in the world of fashion and computer-generated art with AI-generated paintings fetching huge sale prices and his collaborating with renowned fashion brands like Acne Studio and Balenciaga. There’s something utterly jarring the moment your eye hits the “canvas” of a Barrat work; it’s quite other-worldly in the best sense possible–in the most computer sense possible. Just like how the Van Gogh’s and Monet’s of the art world cemented their place in cultural history through the inherent motif inculcated in their “style,” i.e., the stylistic elements that immediately separate their works from others in a purely aesthetic way (e.g., how their brush strokes in a particular way, how those patterns culminate, etc.). Weirdly enough, Barrat clearly puts in the effort in his program to be able to do something similar as it takes two weeks for such paintings to be generated, and when you look at enough of them, you can easily recognize the stylistic elements we could call Barratian. The beautiful drippiness, haziness, euphoric fuzziness, and heavy-like “brush-strokes” make for a hyperreal, thick, layered oil painting with textures that are impossible to create with real paint. His AI is able to do this by analyzing the thousands of painting examples Barrat has fed into its system in order to make these paintings. Those examples along with the AI guidance constitute the probability distributions of the program, but otherwise you can see how random the AI can get with how vastly different the paintings are aesthetically. I feel like Barrat truly made something special here and am very interested in seeing where he ends up in either the computer or art world.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-17/ai-made-incredible-paintings-in-about-two-weeks