Interdisciplinary Encounters 2020
“I was not afraid of losing the “personal touch” so highly valued in previous painting. On the contrary, I even gave up signing my paintings. I put numbers and letters with the necessary data on the back of the canvas, as if they were cars, airplanes, or other industrial products.”
— László Moholy-Nagy (1944)
Telephone Paintings is an infinite-3D art gallery. Inside it are paintings and texts created using artificial intelligences. The work uses three generative adversarial networks (GANs) working in tandem:
- The first GAN (StyleGan) creates an infinitely varied set of paintings in the style of abstract 20th century art.
- The paintings are then shown to a second GAN (Yolov3). Yolov uses object detection to name the objects in the paintings, which are then used to generate a descriptive phrase in fairly grammatical English.
- This descriptive phrase is then fed into a third GAN (GPT2) which creates a short description of the work’s history and (imaginary) artists involved. This network has been trained on the descriptions of various modern art museums.
The gallery is then procedurally created using Unity. In the gallery space itself, nothing repeats. Code controls the selection of artworks, the camera, and the 3D models. The audio is an abstracted soundscape of server farms– fans and rhythmic mechanical pulsing.
Telephone Paintings is an ongoing work by Steven Sych and Timothy Thomasson. The work is dedicated to Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946).
Viewing Instruction
Press 1, 2, 3 on the keyboard or screen to zoom in and out. Slide the volume to increase or decrease the speed.
It goes on forever. Take your time.
Biographies
Steven Sych received his B.A. (Honors) in Philosophy (University of Alberta 2009) and his PhD. in Philosophy (McGill 2016). His doctoral work surrounded the social conception of genius found in the Early German Romantics. Currently, he is an instructor at John Abbott college where he has taught everything from documentary film to science fiction to game design to sexual ethics. His research interests focus on speculative design and self-reflexivity in games, with more recent work exploring notions of softness in relation to the digital.
Timothy Thomasson is an artist and researcher living and working in Montreal. His work questions the ways in which moving images are produced and consumed contemporaneously. He works with animation, film, sound, and utilize computational models in many of his projects to create continually generative environ- ments and systems. Thomasson has exhibited work during Nuit Blanche Montreal (2017, 2018) and has pre- sented projects at events such as MUTEK_IMG (2018). He holds a BFA in Computation Arts from Concor- dia University where he is currently pursuing a Masters of Design with a focus in digital moving imagery.
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