hello and welcome to my first artlog. here's a redux of my work this month, just the pieces i like the best.
accessibility notes: this log is gif-heavy and filled with edited AI-generated images. they're not described, i just don't know how to describe such abstract images. do hit me up if you have pointers on that. the paintins are described on alt text :)
since it's the first log i'll introduce my AI work a little bit. i've been at this since around october 2020, at first using artbreeder and now experimenting with colab notebooks. the one i use the most is the AI art machine — it's very simple to use with nice results.
for my gifs, i've got a smooth process using the video the AI art machine generates. i've made my own photoshop action so it boomerangs back and forth, and when i save for web i adjust the colors, size and dithering pattern. i've found 16 to 64 colors give the nicest results, but it really depends on the image. changing the colors can really change the mood of the gif, and it's a really quick and easy thing to play around with.
angel of death and decay I | II
angel dissection | spider angel
gentle carrion viscera
of course, my paintings this month are in dialogue with my AI art, and the theme is mostly angels again. it's all vaguely related to my antichrist zine. i'm taking it slow with it but i'm really hoping to put some pen to paper (well. stylus to tablet) on january. it's still a bit of a mess and i'm not entirely sure what path to take with it: an essay like transgenderize the eschaton, a comic, a short story, all of the above? i'm leaning towards a vaguely comic-like object, fiction and essay haphazardly entertwined. maybe that's just a cop out. i've been really digging yourneighbortoasty's work, and in the end that's also kinda similar to transgenderize's format anyway, isn't it?
underwater choir
an angel, dissected (organs missing)
spirit
not a real reading list. i read a lot of books, sure, but i mean random rabbithole 2am wikipedia topics. off the top of my head? i've read about plankton and sea angels. it's a pretty cool little niche. did you know there's plankton in the air? the definition is broad: it just means stuff that floats without opposing a current (water or air). for my angels, in this case, i'm tempted to call them dataplankton — popular name 'web angels'.
i've mentioned it before on tumblr, but i just want to do some housekeeping on this artlog, so as a recap: for my antichrist project, angels are these... entities? that exist where there's data. more specifically they spawn / breed / live / exist in the latent space, building up where the influx of data is very high such as big servers and bitcoin farms. it's technobabble but it's my technobabble! i enjoy reading about the nitty gritty of tech but there's only so much i can do. i like to take liberties, it's not like it matters.
and speaking of latent space, 3blue1brown's videos on neural networks are a must watch. they're really interesting and well paced. i haven't watched the final one yet, since calculus is out of my league. for now. anyway, the videos don't actually really cover latent space as a concept, but that's one of the tricky things no one really can explain, from what i gathered. machine learning for artists is a nice resource that actually touches on that, but sadly they never went too much past the MNIST dataset. still pretty interesting.
i've also bought making pictures with generative adversarial networks but due to covid i have no idea when it'll arrive. i want to scan it and upload it though. is it a bit of a shitty move towards the author? perhaps, but this kind of resource is just so hard to find that i'll still have a clear conscience. there's no ebook so if you're outside north america like me, you end up paying more for shipping than for the book itself, and there's the wait time, the currency exchange rates...
well, i think that's all for now! this was nice to write, i love talking about myself and machine learning stuff haha. thanks for your time, hope you stick around :)