ON::VIEW Residency Finale
I’m so grateful for having been able to spend the past month in residence ON::VIEW at Sulfur Studios! Connecting with people, sharing my process, and how I use artificial intelligence in my work has been a great experience. Everyone comes at this with a different perspective, so I’ve gotten a lot of practice talking about the work and bringing people into my process from where they are.
During the residency, I held open studio hours, inviting people in to participate by painting with me. Participants were given the option of learning a little about how waves are physiologically calming, and creating a waveform painting, or doing a meditative prompt about body awareness and creating an intuitive abstract painting. With 30+ paintings in each series, the works were digitized and used to train two separate artificial intelligence models. These models then generate more work, that is a combination of everything it learned from that dataset. I comb through thousands of resulting images, and work with them further to create a final collection of images and video clips.
Here are some of the intuitive abstract results:
Here are some of the waveform series results:
It was cool to see people come back in for the finale reveal that had worked on the project with me, or checked up on its progress over time. I really liked having all the work hung from the walls as it built up, and still on display with the video pieces being shown on screens in the same space. It really gave a sense of the entire project.
The month flew by! I was too engaged in conversation all evening to get photos with people in them, so here’s one last shot of the studio before I moved out.
There is an NFT to collect for free from the project, and I’ll be sharing more from it going forward. You can collect those here: https://jenpalmerart.cent.co
I’ll also be making more prints available from this work, make sure you’re subscribed to get updates when those become available.
Thanks! 🖤
Wallpapers
I was really into this piece and made a background so I wanted to share, go ahead and save your preferred color!
REMIX
REMIX Exhibition promotional by Playform
I’m excited to be participating in REMIX an exhibition by Playform, exclusively on Rarible. The NFT art works will be available on Aug. 9th, and some of the artists, including myself, will be participating in an artist talk. If you want to hear more about making work with no code AI, NFTs, discussion on mashup, and new technologies, here’s the link:
About REMIX
Appropriating, amalgamating and collaging have been prevalent artistic methods throughout history. Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain '' and Warhol’s “Botticelli” are some examples of re-contextualizing throughout the art historical canon. Inspired by the artistic concepts of sampling and mashup, Playform Studio presents a Studio group exhibition, “REMIX.”
Defining new ways of creating in the age of AI, “REMIX” explores the ever-emerging relationship between technology and art. Works from “REMIX” will also be available as NFTs, exclusively on Rarible.
Featured artists include:
Carla Gannis, Chris Trueman, Andrew Tricaso, Trygve Skogrand, Jen Palmer, Nathaniel Stern, Albert Abdul-Barr Wang, Roxy Savage, Katya Grokhovsky, Irina Raicu, Michael Pierre Price, Yeli Rodriguez, and Witold Riedel.
YOU CAN PLAY TOO!
Play with REMIX Artwork in Playform Stylize
The exhibition release is in affiliation with Playform’s Stylize feature which offers Playform users to apply the style of their favorite artists onto any photo, image or sketch. The final works featured in the exhibition are options of “Pre-Defined Style” within the Stylize feature. Playform users are invited to "remix" their own images with these new styles!
Here are some of the images I've remixed with my own Pro Art Filter! (click to view them in the lightbox)
Screenshot of Playform, featuring an image with my REMIX Pro-Art Filter applied
Screenshot of the Playform Stylize Interface.
You can use Playform from a mobile device or computer. You select your style, then upload your image. You can choose which process, and how much style and composition affect the result. Just go to https://playform.io/jen to check it out! Oh, and share your stylized images with me on Instagram or via email!
Pinspiration Project
I started taking screenshots of my Pinterest feed a while back. I'm not sure what I was even going to do with them, I just was interested in the way the algorithm shows me things that I like, but also creates some sort of connections between the images it's showing me. A black bird. A tattoo of a bird and berries. A berry cobbler recipe. A lady with short hair. A drapey layered outfit in shades of black. An abstract painting with blotches of purple. There is something similar that the algorithm is picking up on. These connections somehow relate to my taste. What is it? What does it say about me? What can I learn from this information?
I've used Pinterest since it came out, finding it a positive space to explore ideas. Using boards to pin my project inspiration, plan parties, collect quotes, connect with people who liked these niche things, or experienced chronic illness.
For this project, I took the screenshots where I found interesting connections, and I separated the images so that the software doesn't implement the grid form of Pinterest - I'm interested in what happens between the concepts of these images.
I fed these 200+ images to the Playform platform, and am currently waiting to see what happens!
Can machine interpretation give us useful information about ourselves? Will it reflect something of my values back to me? My tastes? My interests? What form will these take? ...
Let me tell you about my new romance…
I joined the virtual studio at Playform, and am currently working on a project based on recent collected works. I was truly excited to discover this platform for creating AI art, and maybe have previously underestimated my love for all things digital?
In thinking about it, I realized that I can trace my digital art-making back to my video painter, and maybe back to those days in kindergarten when we had computer class, and got to make art on the Macs? I'm one of those millennials who didn't have to be tech-savvy - we didn't have the internet until around when I went to college. I didn't even know I was tech-savvy until somewhere in my 30's and I realized I was giving out a lot of help, and it was surprising to me that people didn't understand it. Now, I would definitely consider myself an early adopter. It makes sense that I am because I feel ridiculously excited about the potential I see. Partially because exploring that potential gives me such a sense of joy. I think this is deeply related to radical hope. It's not something that exists here yet, but I can feel its existence. I noted that same sense of joy was frequently present when editing photographs, playing with texture and color, layers, versions...
These explorations are my way of studying, understanding something more. It feels like a word I can't recall, a place I can't remember my way to - It is so strong, but it is also emptiness. The matter is in the relationship, in the space between. The Playform platform is a tool to help me explore this space!
How does it work? There are computers that the platform is connected to, and I uploaded around 50 of my works of art. The computers essentially then learn those images, the forms, lines, colors, etc., and create renderings of new work. Those renderings can be further developed, mixed, and used in ways I haven't even discovered all of yet.
Developing models on Playform
I'm (obviously) enthusiastic about this new digital tool, and how it truly fits into my work.
Case in point - The other day, I was just sitting in my studio, smiling to myself thinking about Arthur Batut and his ideas on virtuality.
"To reproduce with the help of photography a figure whose material reality does not exist anywhere, an unreal being whose constituent elements are scattered over a certain number of individuals and which can only be conceived virtually, is it not a dream?" - Arthur Batut (translated from French)
Ah, so thrilling! Did I mention Batut lived from 1846 to 1918? What would he even think of something like Playform? We can't know the answer, but I'd love to hear yours!
Marsha P. Johnson
I’m not as far along with my portrait project as I had planned, but “pay it no mind”… here’s Marsha, available in print form, just in time for PRIDE month! If you’re interested in learning about who Marsha was, I recommend watching “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson”, available on Netflix.
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