Spring Clean + Training an AI (life?) Model
aka: confusing the f*ck out of myself and my computer.
I’ve had a month away from my online walks, and have been taking some time out to rest (something I am learning to make a bigger part of my creative practice!)
Last week I submitted my first Arts Council DYCP application- I’m not holding out for it, but- honestly- continuing with my practice in the areas I’d like will be more or less impossible without funding support.
I like using accessible tech/low-cost tech to explore visual ideas (for example, my projects ‘#dancingontheinternet, and LOOP) , and I consider myself fairly resourceful (necessity = invention, ect) but there is a point where I need to spend a couple of days in my studio, uninterrupted by needing to do the unrelated paid work that allows me to even have a studio, on top of being a single renter in an increasingly expensive city.
Anyway, this blog isn’t about the cost of living crisis (although it is an all-consuming thread that is running through a lot of artists’ lives right now ofc.) DYCP rounds are competitive, but it’s worth a shot. Should find out by July. Until then, time to take out the trash!
A couple of weeks ago I had a BIG clear out of my studio. If you’re new to my practice, you may not know that from around 2008 to 2016/17, my practice was predominantly informed by life drawing. I drew most days, attending and running life drawing sessions, as well as modelling as my main job for a number of years too. This means I have *a lot* of drawings, and every year or so, I’d throw away anything I either wasn’t happy with or couldn’t sell.
Whilst I still life model from time to time, and run drawing events, I’ve not drawn regularly for ages, so hadn’t had a clear out. Drawings are a record of time for me, so going through them is often a trip down memory lane too- I remember drawing someone much better than when I look back at a photo, so I keep many drawings of friends as personal keepsakes.
As part of this recent process, I decided to photograph each drawing to be thrown away or kept and use them to create an AI data set. Despite being an artist with an interest in digital, I’m not particularly obsessed with AI in the way a lot of people seem to be right now, but am interested in how it can be used as a tool to further creativity, rather than ‘steal’ it from humans. I did find the recent episode about AI & Art from Radio 4’s Digital Human approached the subject really well.
I have absolutely zero skills when it comes to programming- I learned html to build very basic websites in the 00s, like a lot of Millennials- but despite my best efforts to learn, it just doesn’t compute in my brain. I wondered if I could use my own collection of drawings to create a dataset and then somehow generate a ‘drawing’ out of my own drawings. (Should be easy, right? You can learn a lot on youtube!)
I went on a rather chaotic journey in Vertex AI/Google Cloud via a lot of YouTube videos and after about 3 days of getting really stressed, I managed to create a data set of drawings and train one very shaky classification model. I somehow then managed to upload a new drawing and my model was able to classify it as a ‘drawing’ of someone ‘sitting down’ who definitely has a ‘face’. Then it broke and couldn’t get it to work again.
I’m still none the wiser as to how it worked, how I did it, or how I might do it again. But it was an interesting and abstract creation process.
Next steps? I’m not quite sure. It would be great to find a more accessible way to play around with generating AI art using my own datasets, but using Google Cloud was almost completely impenetrable for me after a while. It may as well be in another language, which is a shame as I understand what a data set is, how a model works etc, I just don’t have the technical background to trawl through all the jargon to get me somewhere interesting. (Suggestions for good tutorials/resources for artists are always welcome!)
Last weekend I visited Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth, where art friend and collaborator Ricardo Reverón Blanco has curated the latest exhibition, ‘Group Show’- a colourful and thoughtful group exhibition about communities and the connections between them. With cities like Brighton now lacking in accessible contemporary art spaces, it was great to see a space like this thriving in another city.
Speaking of thriving in other cities, Worthing & Shoreham have some exciting things coming: on 11 June, our artist collective Artists, Models, iNK are collaborating with The Drawing Room on a big life drawing event as part of the first Worthing Festival: Life Drawing: The Surrealists and other strange phenomena. We’re big Surrealism fans, so this will be a fun theme to explore. It’s close to selling out, so book now if you want to come along.
I’m hoping to bring some Claude Cahun-inspired visuals for those drawing, so in the midst of research as I type...
Just down the way in Shoreham, my studio partner Emma Frankland’s ‘Galatea’ is coming in May as part of the Brighton Festival, and will be performed outdoors in the woods:
Set in a world where gods walk among the mortals, this unapologetically queer story follows different characters - all lost in the woods…
Galatea was written in the 1580s by John Lyly, William Shakespeare’s best-selling but now long-forgotten contemporary, inspiring Shakespeare’s comedies from As You Like It to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Performed in front of Queen Elizabeth I over four hundred years ago, this tale of love, joy and the importance of welcoming outsiders is an incredibly resonant story for modern times.
And finally, whilst on the lookout for new Substacks to follow, I found Katayoun Jalilipour’s and strongly recommend subscribing- a brilliant artist currently exploring queerness in Iranian history.
Resources
https://kateshieldsart.squarespace.com/works/dancingontheinternet
https://kateshieldsart.squarespace.com/works/loop
https://www.ricardoreveronblanco.org/