ARTIFICIAL SEASCAPES
ANNE SPALTER | SOFIA CRESPO
About
Curators: Andrea Steuer, Elena Zavelev & Fanny Lakoubay
The Contemporary and Digital Art Fair is honored to present Anne Spalter and Sofia Crespo, two female artists working with AI technology, at the Ars Electronica Festival 2020. Spalter and Crespo explore current socio-economic issues including COVID19 and ecological uncertainty in their work. Both artists exhibited their work at CADAF Online which took place June 25-28, 2020.
Artificial Seascapes reflects on the impact humans and technology have on the environment and explores new ways to visualize it. By incorporating artificial intelligence, algorithmic tools and data processing into their practice, Spalter and Crespo allow us to see mundane events from the perspective of a machine. By shifting the focal point, scenes that are familiar to the human eye - cruise ship images or sea creatures - begin to evolve, resulting in new compositions that have never been seen.
The artists invite the viewers to submerge in these new worlds, where beauty and technology collide to expose questions of human perspective, consciousness and preservation.
The exhibition, Artificial Seascapes, will be on view at the Ars Electronica Festival, September 9-13, 2020.
SoFia Crespo
“My parents are a big influence. My father is a sea captain. He spent years travelling around the world on a huge huge ship. My mom is an environmental researcher. Through them I have a large connection with nature.”
“Hide & Seek Abundance {Part 1},” Sofia Crespo
“Hide & Seek Abundance {Part 2},” Sofia Crespo
Part of the [[chromatophores]] series. Made in collaboration with Andrew Pouliot Year: 2020
Neural Zoo is an exploration of the ways creativity works: the recombination of known elements into novel ones. These images resemble nature, but an imagined nature that has been rearranged. Our visual cortex recognizes the textures, but the brain is simultaneously aware that those elements don’t belong to any arrangement of reality that it has access to. Computer vision and machine learning could offer a bridge between us and a speculative “natures”; that can only be accessed through high levels of parallel computation.
Starting from the level of our known reality, we could ultimately be digitizing cognitive processes and utilizing them to feed new inputs into the biological world, which feeds back into a cycle.
Routines in an artificial neural network become responsible for authorship and the human artist (with non-artificial neurons) acts as the muse. Implying this change of roles in authorship further confronts us with the question: Can art be reduced to the remapping of data absorbed through sensory processes?
Anne Spalter
“I love the ocean in an objective way and in a subjective way. I am interested in surrealism and dreams. I have always had dreams about water, waves and the oceans—it also represents the unconscious.”
“Quarantine Cruise,” Anne Spalter
“Going Nowhere,” Anne Spalter
Anne Spalter is using AI image creation as a basis for new compositions, this time to create imagery and video about ships trapped out at sea in the time of quarantine. The images combine ghostly ever-morphing forms and the ships seem to move but end up going nowhere. All the ship forms and background colors are generated with AI algorithms. Theoretically, the work draws on philosophies of Carl Jung and Arthur Schopenhaeur as a conceptual framework for the exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) in image generation.
“I am interested in the concept of representation as discussed by Schopenhauer (e.g., “objects are representations”) in the context of generating this seascape imagery with various AI GAN processes. In particular, how do these objects exist distinctly from perception by a subject (i.e., when only “seen” by a machine)? And how does this “perception,” when divorced from human senses, result in an “understanding” of an object or landscape/seascape? During the AI algorithm’s “learning” process, it often develops shapes and compositions that do not resemble anything exactly familiar or that we have seen before.”
In Conversation:
“The process was like working with an interesting studio partner who kept suggesting these fun things to do. I have really enjoyed working with AI.”
“I wanted to find the layer where the neural network learned enough color information and basic shapes of the creatures, so that it would create everything in a single uniform color.”
Q&A:
What is your first artistic memory? Is there an exhibition or experience that has had a lasting impression on yourself or your practice?
My parents dragged me to many museums as a child and I always hated it! But somehow the experiences must have seeped into my brain even against my will.
I’ve always loved Malcom Morely since I first saw his work in the 1980s and recently I saw his show at Sperone Westwater and then more of his paintings (and some of the same ones) at the Hall Foundation in VT and loved them even more. Morely is somehow factual and mysterious at the same time.
-Anne Spalter
I recall being really young and writing poetry about the sea, this must have been when I was around 11 or 12 years old.
I also remember spending a lot of time meditating on each word, their meaning and what they should endeavour to express. It’s quite easy to draw a path from there to my current work and focus, nowadays it’s pixels and images instead of words and sentences
-Sofia Crespo
What is your relationship to academia and digital art? How do you see this being taught to young aspiring artists?
I designed and taught the first courses in digital fine arts at both Brown University and the Rhode Island school of Design and wrote a textbook to support those efforts, The Computer in the Visual Arts. Young artists should definitely become familiar with basic digital tools and concepts, whether or not they end up being an important part of their eventual practice.
-Anne Spalter
Are there any natural or biological phenomena that interest or inspire you?
Honestly, where do you start? Nature has this most fantastically, humbling richness: anytime I feel like I’ve reached a plateau I need just to look at nature again in order to discover a rich new field I never had even heard of before. If I have to single out any one area, I think it has to be the coral reef and all the aquatic life that interacts with it. It’s an ecosystem composed of interdependent parts that form not only a complex whole, but are crucial to so many species that aren’t a permanent component of them.
- Sofia Crespo
Left: “Flame Ship,” Anne Spalter
Right: “Hide & Seek Abundance” (Still), Sofia Crespo
Anne Spalter
Anne Spalter is a digital mixed-media artist and academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts programs at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s. With a decades-long goal of integrating art and technology, Spalter has authored over a dozen academic papers and the seminal, internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999). Alongside her studio practice, Spalter continues to lecture on digital art practice and theory.
Sofia Crespo
Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques.