#the next rembrandr

[saphaburnell]

Artificial Artistry: The Next Rembrandt

Brown eyes stare from a pale, near eyebrow-less face. The scratch of a blond moustache. A dutch ruff with lazy pleats in white and cream paint, fragments of ‘lace’ peek from brush strokes muted in layers. The canvas behind, a dull taupe-grey, looks artificial. So does the lace. As I stare at The Next Rembrandt, I can’t help picking out those smoothed strokes, which seem utter artifice upon closer inspection of one who dabbles in oil painting, from behind the safety of my computer screen.

The Next Rembrandt is an absolute masterpiece.

Engineers, software designers and artificial intelligence experts collaborated with ING, Microsoft, TU Delft and Mauritshuis to create an artificially intelligent ‘artist ghost’, Rembrandt centuries after his death. The limited AI plucked and picked at his life’s work, emptied every sworl, stroke, portrait and painting until it deconstructed the elements of Rembrandt down to the artistic quark. Machine learning algorithms broke Rembrandt’s career down to most prevalent subject matter, median lines of skin tone, clothing style, expression. Down further, into the intimate and microscopic ridges of paint layers and their vertices, chemical make-up of the paint applied and how that reflected in the tones and colours.

The limited AI “distilled the artistic DNA from his work” (nextrembrandt.com), with aid from its’ human team of researchers, who pared down to Rembrandt’s most prevalent type of painting, that of “a portrait of a Caucasian male with facial hair, between the ages of thirty and forty, wearing black clothes with a white collar and a hat, facing to the right” (nextrembrandt.com). With the guidelines of the human caretakers in place, the machine could compile and 3D print its’ magnum opus.

When I first saw The Next Rembrandt project, it brought me back to the excitement of writing science fiction. In NEON Lieben, we have the foundations for what future books in the Lieben Cycle call ‘International Treasures’. People whose craft, talents or arts were too important to lose, and thus were brought back again and again. In my manuscripts, cloning and genetic memory handle the transference of skill and knowledge. This idea is spawned in its’ infancy in NEON Lieben and developed by Isle of Noises (Book 3, in development).

It would be such a simple switch, to turn genetic knowledge into a virtual genome, a set of algorithms and patterns, which approximate the touch and feel of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway. Creators, whose lives were cut short could continue that half-constructed masterpiece, steady in variation. What would it be like to have several portraits, potential reconstructions grown by computers purpose built to endure past artist’s lifetimes? Could artists work with limited AI to develop their algorithms, pass the torch of their continued work a century or more after they were gone?  Who would own the copyright of such works, the engineers and programmers of the algorithmic machine, or the artist’s estate who inspired it?

As Rutger University’s AICAN generates art, it filters past art history to extrapolate a future progression via increased output of abstraction. Art naturally through human history ventures from totemic, to figurative realism, to abstraction in a similar method to a child’s burgeoning creativity. The search for accuracy, for realism in one’s art often leads away from perfection toward greater levels of abstraction as one continues on. I wonder how much of Artificial Intelligence created art will push past our current state and human limitations, to create art for itself, for other AI? Do we take the advance of such artistic pieces as a nouveau gospel?

The inevitability of humanity’s artistic progression, or one interpretation amongst many?

My mind skips past hazy, disjointed non-faces in portraits painted via algorithm back to The Next Rembrandt. His eyes are vivid because he has basis within the artistic integrity of a pre-existing human influence. Until we teach our machines to attach, to recognize emotion within us and thus the shadow of such within themselves, I don’t believe computer generated art will take over more from the perspective of nostalgia than aesthetics. Yes, narrow AI now can create aesthetically pleasing images, but art is interpretation as much as implementation. Interpretation is for now, inherently human, as is financial value.

But the idea of holding onto someone’s electronic ghost fascinates me. It coils into my fiction-work and digs deep into what Lieben can achieve with her Havens and International Treasures. But who chooses which people deserve such immortality? Does time? Expense? Privilege?

Does an algorithmic intellect choose, based on the same extrapolations as La Famille de Belamy as interpreted by GAN? Either way, I look forward to inspecting the lace 3D printed into the ruffs.

#ai art #ai #artificial intelligence #art #rembrandt #the next rembrandr #the next rembrandt