pajaro iterations

yes:

In 2022, I took one of my physical paintings, and ran it through a generative AI application and generated some iterations on my painting. In 2023,I decided to paint some of them.

So, it’s my painting as the seed, and I’m painting iterations, inspired by the generated images.

I’m not printing or tracing anything.

Much like a photo of a beach for a seascape, I use the iteration image as a reference, but I create the physical art with my own hands.

I’m fascinated with the debate going on about the role of Generative AI. I’ve personally had success with LLMs and GAI to get things done…and to help me get things done that I couldn’t get done alone.

I recognize that my experience isn’t representative of everyone’s experience, and I also recognize the extremely grave concerns and worries about attribution, permission, and even more generally about loss of jobs. There are big concerns about “the data set” currently being explored. That seems completely reasonable.

Regardless of the data set, the one message I heard that rang true for me is that LLMs and GAI are tools. You, a human, use them to work. AI clearly can’t do enough on its own yet… Human Still Required™.

So I thought I would test the concept out and see if it was true for me. Can I feed GAI one of my paintings, and ask it to riff on it, conjuring some influence from my favorite, long dead artists.

I generated hundreds of images. Most of them were pretty interesting.

I got laid off from a job and had some free time, and using the reference images, I was able to plow through ten paintings in about two weeks. Then a bunch of things happened 🙁 And then I switched gears on my size format (first 10: 5.5×8.5″ … next 14:16×20″).

I wanted these paintings to be a thought exercise, plus visual art. So, I hope you enjoy my paintings. I know it’s weird. It’s my real painting at the start, and then it’s real paintings as iterations… but there’s something weird in the middle of it. But they’re my paintings… So… ? weird, right?

It feels very much like using a photo of a beach or a mountain as a landscape reference. My references just happen to start off with my own painting.

After I curated the generation of the image set, I produced an animation of all of the images I generated, as a movie. It’s interesting to me because it highlighted things in my own painting that I hadn’t noticed. After seeing the animation, I could see more in my own original painting.

That animation is something I’d like to reproduce with physical paintings. So maybe all 400+ of them? Here’s the first 10:

Then here’s the second 20

then here they are together, slower

wait, how about if I morph between them? Here. hit play and go full-screen:

My original painting:
My paintings of the iterations:
Sequence 01	Sequence 02	Sequence 03
Sequence 04	Sequence 05	Sequence 06
Sequence 07	Sequence 08	Sequence 09
Sequence 10	sequence 11 challenge accepted by Fran Cooley coming soon, I hope!	Sequence 12
Sequence 13	Sequence 14	Sequence 15
Sequence 16	Sequence 17	Sequence 18
Sequence 19	Sequence 20	Sequence 21
Sequence 22	Sequence 23	Sequence 24
Sequence 25

You can watch a playlist of videos here!