I had the privilege to collaborate with the world’s first autonomous AI artist, AICAN. Together we produced a series of portraits “Untitled from Carl Haplin, 2018”, an attempt to re-create a portrait of Charlie Chaplin, with inspiration from Andy Warhol’s screen print techniques and borrowing aesthetics from the Renaissance. The series explores the reconstructive transition from photography back to classical portrait paintings, which yields unpredictable, intriguing, and intermediate forms.
I wanted to further explore the idea of autonomy, educate the AI of a particular subject, in this case a data set of Charlie Chaplin portraits, and allow the AI to reconstruct or paint a portrait in a particular style using pixels. Inspired by Warhol’s method’s, AICAN mass iterated an infinite number of simulations, while we altered levels of colors, emotion, realism and abstraction.
