Wade Marynowsky: From our deceased bodies flowers will grow, we are in them and that is eternity.

Artist(s):

• Wade Marynowsky

Title:

From our deceased bodies flowers will grow, we are in them and that is eternity.

Exhibition:

• SIGGRAPH Asia 2021: Art Gallery: The Future of Ritual and Resonance

Creation Year:

2014-2021

Category:

• Animation and Video
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artist Statement:

Wade Marynowsky, ’From our deceased bodies, flowers will grow we are in them and that is eternity’, high definition video, sound, 3mins, 2021.
Artbreeder (Simon 2020) is a collaborative tool for discovering new images and generating animations. Images are ’bred’ by having ‘children’, or by mixing an images ‘genes’ with other images. The lineage of the hybrid image may be traced through a collaborative family tree, thus breeding and sharing can be used as methods for exploring highly complex spaces. The main technologies enabling the creative tool are Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), (Goodfellow, 2014). In particular BigGAN which was trained on ImageNet, a large visual database of more than 14 million images, designed for use in visual object recognition software research.
Marynowsky has applied experimental methods in an attempt to generate unexpected outcomes from the image generating net- work. In the work, “From our deceased bodies flowers will grow, we are in them and that is eternity”, the artist has purposely input photography of local flowers into the Portrait AI engine, forcing it to find faces where there are none. Some of the local flower images include: Acacia trees; Nasturtium; Camellia, Magnolia; Lavender; Callistemon, etc. The images are not bred any further and exist as the first translations of the Portrait AI algorithm. The most interest- ing images are then selected to become part of the animated morph sequence. The sequence flows from machine abstraction to the rep- resentation of faces, confusing the threshold of anthropomorphism, human’s innate tendency to see faces in the world around us.