𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒕 𝑰𝒔 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝑪𝒂𝒏𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝑺𝒆𝒆

Neural glitching feat. Mario Klingemann

Maybe we’re getting used to it.

The more synthetic images we see, the more familiar they become.

We get used to the weirdness.

The hand of AI, its abstraction, its style. The more we understand how to read these images.

“The generation that grew up with computer games are much more into images that have more entropy, are noisier, crazier…there's a visual evolution.”

But we’re still used to seeing something. An object for our attention.

Mario Klingemann disrupts the idea that we can hold onto a visual.

His work is always partly handed to the control of a machine, he’s fascinated by the idea of images that push the limits while still remaining familiar. Influenced by the artist, but from… a distance.

It’s a fun collaboration.

In Neural Glitch, he deliberately fucked with the training data, removing pieces at random to distort the outputs in unpredictable ways. The machine tries, and fails, to create perfection. What we get instead is phantasmagoria, abstraction.

Botto was a fully autonomous synthetic artist, “parented” by Klingemann, long lines of code that have had a wildly lucrative career.

The Butcher’s Son used Klingemann’s methods to turn stick figures into paintings, pushing the limits of machine creativity.

But the most compelling to me is Memories of Passersby I.

These portraits exist on a wall, but never for very long. The images are part of an endless stream of generation, drawing from a data set of classical paintings, all tuned to Klingemann’s taste. The neverending transitions creates the sense of vague memory, of faces half-seen, half-remembered. Figures appearing from a dream.

When the piece was sold, it was the first time an AI work had been auctioned in Europe. But what was bought, really? Not a portrait — because there isn’t one. The art is the algorithm that creates the images.

What Klingemann had made was a curated dream. A space of endless people imagined by a machine, presented to us, temporarily, as real.

Because the output is always changing, only the intention remains fixed. The code. The process.

The faces aren’t the point, it’s not what the art is. The art is the algorithm.

The art is the thing you cannot see.

.

.

.

Go further:

Memories of Passersby I (Sotheby’s)