While old school forms of art, from Renaissance Age-esque paintings and sculptures to the street art and murals designed to send messages, might imply that art is a tech-free industry, this belief couldn’t be further than the truth. With the development of 3-D printers, laser printers, and even code-generated paintings, the world of illustrations, painting, sculpting, grafting, and all things creative has become interwoven with the world of technology. As the age of digital artists blossoms, the inventive and innovative are finding more and more ways to integrate music, machinery, and mobility with art, to turn exhibits, like those listed below, into full-blown experiences. These 10 fascinating pieces are the best technology-inspired art that 2019 has to offer. Dive into a world where coding meets color!
(By Culturespaces: E. Spiller, Source)
In 2019, private art collective Culturespaces took a very literal approach in “bringing to life” Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous painting, Starry Night. In this fantastical exhibition, artistic director Gianfranco Iannuzzi used nothing less than state-of-the-art technology to make visitors feel as though they had walked straight into the painting. The space was filled with 140 strategically placed laser video projectors and 50 speakers to make the experience wholly immersive
This wondrous piece was brought to the world by BREAKFAST, an art organization based out of New York that creates interactive art installments. In their 2019 exhibit named Awaken 1, they built a wall using mirrored Brixels, a brick-shaped physical “pixel” that can rotate in any direction. This piece made use of science, engineering, and 168 Brixels to create a wall that would move along with any motions made in front of it. In the above video, watch as Awaken 1 turns the air into a canvas.
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Do these faces look familiar? Well, they shouldn’t! Icons8 is a company that specializes in software for designs, photography, and many other forms of artistic expression. Their latest jump to genius can be seen in their 2019 creation, a platform they named Generated Photos. This platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to digitally generate faces that look unquestionably real. Generated Photos as a software and a platform is the next level of portraiture, capturing every single nuance of human detail perfectly in over 100,000 different generated faces. It is also a much needed new innovation in the world of royalty-free photos.
(By Espen Kluge, Source)
Alternatives is a series by renowned Norwegian artist, who has also raised the bar on colorful and abstract portraiture. While code-generated art is known for its creation of fluid but firm geometric shapes, Esplen Kluge takes its intended uses further than ever before and creates stunning portraits with this technology. A photo is fed into the algorithm designed by this artist, which then renders the portrait using pixels and vector-based patterns, drawing lines between the dimensions and resulting in the unique designs you see above.
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Having spent his younger days buried in codes, Mario Klingemann is a self-taught programmer and seeks to delve into the world of art through artificial intelligence and “machine artists”. Klingemann’s goals as an artist are to explore perceptions and cultures with the aid of machine learning. The piece above, from the series Memories of Passerby I, makes use of a machine and corresponding algorithm created by the artist himself, which generates continually morphing “old-master” style portraits but in a brand new light.
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Another artist that sought to maintain the imprint of culture in art while at the same time encouraging tech-driven art, is Oliver Van Herpt, a Dutch Ceramist. His collection of vases was made using an industrial 3-D Printer built by the artist himself, which has one unique quality: It prints items made of clay rather than plastic which is the usual material used by these printers. His printer is designed to ensure that each vase printed maintains its connection to the local environment, using sensors that replicate certain textures and shapes caused by external cultural factors. You can see the stunning naturalistic results in the above picture.
(By Andrew Rae, Source)
It seems like everywhere you look nowadays, more and more people are buried in their phones, completely engrossed by the virtual world instead of the real world, as if there was an unnatural force drawing them into it. This is a sentiment shared by illustrator Andrew Rae. Rae sees phones as a portal between these two worlds, the digital and the physical, and seeks to pull them together with a sense of adventure and surprise. He creates images that depict different creatures and things climbing out of our phones, out of the virtual and into the analog.
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An artist-by-day from Argentina, Manolo Gamboa Naon spends his downtime buried in code and programming, experimenting with coding languages like Puredata, Unity, and Javascript to create digital masterpieces in vivid technicolor. These images are designed and selected to look like micro-organisms viewed under a microscope, teeming with life and brilliance. Naon seeks to bring out the radiating importance of error in turning coding to art, and how beautiful those errors can be in creating unique, beyond-imagination images.
(By Sachyn, Wikimedia Commons (left) and AI Portrait (right))
Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly moving leaps and bounds in the field of portraiture, and Watson’s AI Lab, a collaborative effort of MIT and IBM is leading the charge. With their new software, simply entitled AI Portraits, you can really get the newest freshest taste of what history has had to offer. Any portrait or photograph uploaded to the AI is analyzed and then recreated as a Renaissance Age masterpiece, selecting the optimum background and style from the era. Enjoy the best of historical art in brilliant 4K portraits.
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It may be tough to see at first, but don’t let the neon lights trick you. This poignant piece seeks to capture a young woman in the midst of a “silent moment” while floating between the various modes of technology we surround ourselves with. She is depicted slumped over on a table, her smartphone inches away from her hand. The objects in the room, from the woman to her phone to the bowl of fruits resting on her table, as lit up with neon lights, designed to bring to light the “anticipation for information”.
