Love these two images by Afrofuturist artist Nettrice Gaskins, who uses her technique of creating Black artist portraiture through the collaboration of Google's Deep Dream neural network on stills featuring Lupita Nyong'o from Us, Jordan Peele's new acclaimed mega-hit.
"I use images with abstract textures and them composite the results -- sometimes [with] Photoshop and sometimes Microsoft Word (true story)," Dr. Gaskins tells me. "My work in Deep Dream is similar to my collage work using traditional artist materials. The process I use to draw and paint is what I'm using in Deep Dream." More specifically:
"I'm generating several Deep Dream imaged based on the same source image and changing the style image each time, then compositing all of them using MS Word or Photoshop. One style image could be a charcoal drawing, another conte or oil paint. It might be a specific color palette. It depends on what I'm envisioning the final image to look like."
More of her explorations with Deep Dream on her site. She also has a spoiler-thick review of Us on her blog, which I'm not going to read just yet since I haven't seen the movie, but I suspect re-imagining the Us character Adelaide through a neural network takes the movie's theme of duality and doppelgängers to another, fascinating level.
Update, 11:53am: To that last point, Nettrice just messaged this to me: "I suppose one might liken the Tethered system to artificial intelligence (the domain where Deep Dream lives), especially as it uses neural network technology making sense of what our brains do. Without spoiling anything, I like to think that the real people are like source images in Deep Dream and the Tethered are styles of the image sources."
MS Word?
Posted by: Tony Puyear | Friday, March 29, 2019 at 12:37 PM