Introducing artonomous - a collaboration with Kitty Simpson

Launching into a big collaboration with photographer Kitty Simpson where we are going to make a couple hundred portraits together. We are calling the project artonomous and the goal is to bring my robots closer to creating fine art.

I’ll begin by revealing the logo, which I can’t believe I came up with. This is single-handedly the most creative thing I have ever made and alone makes this project worth while. It has four layers of meaning hidden in it making it perhaps the deepest piece of art I have ever created ;)

Beyond the logo, we are going in the opposite direction of most other A.I. Art projects. Instead of inhaling vast amounts of data to train my neural networks, we are going with a very curated set. We will still need hundreds (even thousands) of images to train my robots to see and paint faces, but all of them will be highly curated by Kitty Simpson.

Instead of gorging the networks with thousands and thousands of face photos taken by paparazzi like the famous CelebA dataset, we will be feeding my neural networks the refined photography of Kitty Simpson. Each portrait will be taken or directed by Kitty then sent into my robot’s creative mind. Once it has applied its A.I. to studying an analyzing the photo, it will paint a portrait.

Every eight or so paintings, the robot will study its own brushstrokes to improve its neural networks.

It will then attempt to paint an original face based on the highly curated photos and its own paintings.

Afterwards Kitty and I critique the work and reprogram the robot’s A.I. and neural networks to better interpret and render Kitty’s photography.

This cycle is repeated over and over again in a creative feedback loop as the robot refines its fine art portraiture.

We plan on doing about 256 portraits like this. Should be fun. The following is a timelapse of the first imagined portrait in the series…

Pindar