CLOT MAGAZINE | ‘AI Am I? Yeah, We Are. Alexander Reben and the Machine’
Interesting article which we invite you to read here!
FriDAI Brunch | DIGITAL ART IMMERSION
We are happy to join the conversation next Friday Oct. 9th @10am CEST! We invite you to the event at the following link:https://www.crowdcast.io/e/fridai-brunch-5 .
A Nasty Boy: How Africa's Foremost Crypto Artist Is Changing The Way We Perceive Masculinity
‘It is the end of an era for Osinachi. On the day we meet, his closest friends are in his now-stripped apartment after days of helping him move the belongings he hastily left behind in Nsukka. “Welcome to this apartment that is no longer mine. I’m moving to Lagos, where it’s all happening,” he says, laughing. He will miss the cold weather of Nsukka, where he spent the last ten years as a student of English Language and Library Science before resuming as an Academic Librarian at the University of Nigeria. “It’s the cultural capital of West Africa. I want to be closer to the market.”
The decision to leave the security of a government job and focus on his art in the city that never sleeps is not only a career strategy but also a testament to his success as a digital artist. It is almost unbelievable that this success began two years ago with a decision to find opportunities to showcase his work. “People look at the surface and often think I jammed luck,” he says. “But this is not something I started 2 or 3 years ago. Before I got into the University in 2010 I was already creating art. It's the work I put in over the years that everyone sees now.”’
Read full article here.
UPCOMING DIGITAL EVENTS
Art — A Value Preserving Asset with Conscience?
September 24, 2020 | 12:00 - 15:00 GMTThe Art Dialogues convenes a niche community of art investors, financiers, insurers, art funds, family offices, foundations, endowments, collectors, creators, curators, gallerists, and designers at the intersection of cultural impact for knowledge-sharing, inspiration, collecting and investing in Art.
In these uncertain times, investors and high-net-worths are turning to value-preserving art assets to either provide benefits of diversification that can help them weather market volatility or raise cash from their art assets to meet margin calls on their investment portfolios. However, many still argue that the perception of art as an investment-grade asset class may have been overdone. Citing the illiquid and opaque nature of the art market, as well as the limited data available for accurate investment analysis.
How investable is modern and contemporary art as an alternative asset class? To what extent has COVID-19 shifted the perception of modern and contemporary art as an investable asset? To what extend will digitization and emerging art technology make the art more transparent and accessible as an asset class? How can this impact art valuations and benchmarking with other asset classes? Beyond art acquisition and investing - Whats does sustainability and impact mean for the art industry?
The Art Dialogue series places emphasis on curating an ecosystem of professionals with an appetite for noteworthy and emerging modern and contemporary art.
Find out more & register here.
Deloitte’s Art & Finance Panels
ArtCity 2020
23 - 28 October 2020 - Every day from 15:30 to 17:00 (Central European Time Zone) onlineDeloitte Art & Finance panel series is held in conjunction with the first edition of ArtCity*, a novel interactive platform available in 8 languages, which replicates the in-person experience of a live art fair.
Every day, from 23 to 28 October, Deloitte Luxembourg will lead 7 online conference panels, organized in collaboration with Deloitte China, Italy, Japan, Monaco, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland and USA, on various subjects.
Open call for AR artists for #DigitalartMonth with program by KVG
The Digital Art Month is a creative celebration of digital and new media art kicking off October 1, 2020, in New York. #DigitalArtMonth
The inaugural edition presents curated exhibitions located in various public locations and online.
Are you an artist creating Augmented Reality Art or Video Art? Then apply with KVG! If selected, with us you will have the chance not only to see your work exhibited during the DaM but also featured for sale on our online platform!
Top Locations:
Fifth Avenue, NY
Flatiron & NoMad, NY
Madison Avenue, NY
Mana Contemporary, NJ, Chicago & Miami
Meatpacking District, NY
SoHo’s Broadway from Houston to Canal, NY
The National Arts Club, NY
393, NY
What is Digital Art Month?
A month-long celebration of digital and new media art presented by CADAF
Augmented Reality and Video Art Exhibitions placed in public spaces and online
An interactive map on the Digital Art Month site with all participating locations
Where is Digital Art Month?
Participating locations in NYC and other cities
Online on the CADAF website and on social media under the hashtag #DigitalArtMonth
When is Digital Art Month?
October 1 - October, 31, 2020
What type of art will be shown?
Public exhibitions will consist of Augmented Reality (AR) art that can be viewed using QR codes and Video art screenings
For Augmented Reality artists:
Make sure that your artworks can be activated via QR Codes!
CADAF will print the QR Codes and the artist will provide the link to connect to the artwork
For the artists applying with AR works please specify what app you are using. Please note that Instagram & Snapchat are the ones that work best for this event.
Please keep in mind that the QR Codes will be placed in public locations, so it’s not possible to accept artworks that are activated or rely on physical objects.
How can I view the AR art?
QR codes will be scanned with your smartphone using the camera app or Instagram
Use the interactive map on www.digitalartmonth.com to see all participating locations and works
Digital Art Month team members will rotate between the sites to give tours and answer questions
Here you can see an example of AR work by amazing artist Sofia Crespo and each 3D artwork is listed for sale on SuperRare, make sure to check them out!
The Game of Life exhibition featured in 'The Brooklyn Rail'
Our current online exhibition ‘The Game of Life - Emergence in Generative Art’ curated by Jason Bailey has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail!
You can read the article here.
The Art of Collecting NFTs (August 27th, 5PM CEST), panel discussion with art collectors and enthusiasts Judy Mam (Dada.art), Kate Vass, Anne Spalter and Matthew (Cent).
The Blockchain Game Alliance invites you to attend a panel conversation with art collectors and enthusiasts Judy Mam (Dada.art), Kate Vass (Kate Vass Gallery), Anne Spalter (https://annespalter.com) and Matthew (Cent).
The art of collecting NFTs takes into account a number of factors collectors would most probably consider when acquiring an artwork. These factors normally include and refers to: artist reputation, art medium, press coverage, quotation, provenance and condition, use of technology (in some cases) and overall the art sentiment value. According to art critic, curator and historian Hans Ulrich Obrist “to make a collection is to find, acquire, organize and store items’’. Often collectors have multiple meanings for building an art collection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDCjbI4m2yY
During this panel conversation our speakers will discuss the nature of what motivates art collectors, their reasons for collecting and how they approach the selecting process when acquiring an art piece. Obrist carries on saying that “collection-making […] is a method of producing knowledge”. If the non fungible art space still represents a small portion of the art market size, it is true that the market is progressively growing and grabbing the attention of non crypto collectors. In recent weeks we have seen crypto art platforms hitting a weekly volume in sales of just under $93.000 despite the incredibly costly transaction fee on the Ethereum Blockchain where most crypto art sales occur.
In a recent tweet contemporary and crypto artist Pak asked: “What’s the most important attribute that cryptoart will bring to the art world? Can you imagine the transition from the traditional art world happening soon?” This tweet captured a number of comments from fellow artists from the crypto and non-crypto space.
A distinctive comment came from artist and programmer Jeff Davis who believes that the “certification/provenance could be a likely starting point for crossover. Where the token serves more like a record of ownership which passes from buyer to seller whenever a work of art is sold”.
Join our live conversation on August 27th at 5PM CET on the Art of Collecting NFTs on the Blockchain Game Alliance Twitter and Youtubechannels
Our speakers
Kate Vass
Art Collector and Art Gallery focuses on generative & new media art (Blockchain, AI, Crypto Collectibles, digital art). Mrs Vass, as owner and creative director of Kate Vass Galerie, focusing on generative arts (new media art, digital, crypto). Kate Vass Galerie is the first physical gallery in the world, headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, which specialises in art and technology (blockchain, crypto, AI). KVG is a pioneer gallery, whose mission is to link traditional and digital art. The gallery lies at the intersection of art and tech with the purpose to serve as a “portal” between these two coexisting realities.
Mrs Vass has excellent contacts to museums, private collectors and artists’ estates all over the world and has been organizing many art exhibitions (photography, contemporary, generative and blockchain art). As a freelance exhibition curator and experienced specialist in the art market, Kate, has experience advising private collectors and companies since 2013. She is a certified Curator, by Sotheby’s Institute of Art and has a Master’s degree in Arts Studies from the University of Zurich, as well as Business Management at the European Business School London (EBS) and Swiss Business School (MBA in Finance & Banking). She has built up her own private contemporary art collection (focusing on generative art) as well as an extensive library, with a particular emphasis in the field of generative photography and contemporary art. Ms Vasilieva has worked for UBS with private collectors and advised many years on wealth planning, followed by opening of her own advisory firm F.A.R.E Consulting, offering one of the services on art consulting in the filed of the regulatory changes, implementation of digital marketing as a sales strategy for art galleries and building/integrating e-commerce platforms.
https://www.katevassgalerie.com/blog
Judy Mam
Art collector and the co-founder of dada.art. Judy Mam is the cofounder of dada.art, the only visual conversation platform where people from all over the world speak to each other through drawings, creating collaborative art. DADA is building a token economy with a gamified incentive framework to create a new economic paradigm for artists in which making art is separated from sales transactions, allowing artists to create freely while they receive a passive income for their contribution to the community.
Judy writes an opinion column for The Americano and she writes about film in her blog I’ve Had It With Hollywood. Before devoting herself to DADA, she was a creative director in advertising. Originally from Mexico City, she lives in New York City.
Anne Spalter: Digital mixed media artist, Spalter Collection, founder of RISD’s and Brown’s original digital fine arts programs.
Spalter’s decades-long goal of integrating art and technology includes founding the original digital fine arts programs at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s. While there, she authored over a dozen academic papers and the widely used textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts. Work on this book led to an interest in collecting digital work and the Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Art Collection (spalterdigital.com) is now one of the largest private collections of early computer art. Spalter is also on the Digital Art Acquisitions Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Recently, Spalter has been working on large-scale public projects in an effort to bring digital art to audiences beyond traditional museums and galleries: In 2016, she created an MTA Arts 52-screen digital art installation, New York Dreaming, which was on view in the Fulton Center through Fall 2017. From Dec 2018 — early 2019, her video work, Turning Festival, was on view in the Hong Kong Harbor, displayed by LED over 47,000sq feet on the Tsim Sha Tsui and Empire Centre buildings. A new body of work, further developed at a Winter 2019 residency at MASS MoCA, combines artificial intelligence image algorithms with oil paint and pastels. Her work is included in a number of public and private collections.
https://annespalter.com/about/
Matthew: Crypto art collector, podcaster, co-founder of CENT.co and also the creator of the weekly WIP Meetup, a VR meetup that showcases NFT projects, crypto artists and DeFi projects.
About the Blockchain Game Alliance
The Blockchain Game Alliance is an organization committed to promoting blockchain within the game industry.
Our goal is to spread awareness about blockchain technologies and encourage adoption by highlighting their potential to foster new ways to create, publish, play, and build strong communities around games.
The BGA also provides an open forum for individuals and companies to share knowledge and collaborate, create common standards, establish best practices, and network.
OSINACHI: “MY BODY, MY CRIME” on Cultural Weekly
OSINACHI: “MY BODY, MY CRIME” on Cultural Weekly
“’Black Lives Matter’ simply refers to the notion that there’s a specific vulnerability for African-Americans that needs to be addressed. It’s not meant to suggest that other lives don’t matter. It’s to suggest that other folks aren’t experiencing this particular vulnerability.” — Barack Obama
KVG Exclusive Interview with Espen Kluge on SuperRare Editorial
We are happy to share that our exclusive interview with Espen Kluge is now featured on the SuperRare Editorial. Don’t miss it!
We thought that it would be a good idea to introduce Espen to the blockchain community and ask him a few questions around some interesting themes such as the creative and technical process behind his work, the blockchain art environment from the artist’s perspective and much more.
VISUAL: In Conversation With Visual Artist Osinachi For His Latest Body Of Work – ‘COVID-19: A General State Of Anxiety’
We are happy to share this cool interview by VISUAL Magazine with Osinachi about his latest series ‘COVID-19: A General State Of Anxiety’. The pieces were part of a larger exhibition at CADAF Online 2020 as facilitated by Kate Vass Galerie in collaboration with the artist.
The series is exploring the effects of the pandemic as it concerns keeping safe, social distancing, and religion. With five powerful illustrations, the artist i is exploring the various states of anxiety that has been prevalent as a response to the pandemic.
You can read full interview here.
The works are currently available exclusively at Kate Vass Galerie as unique NFTs on the blockchain and as beautiful prints.
Stanford Seminar: Online Art for the Age of Plague
We are glad to share that artist Alex Reben will be giving a virtual lecture for Stanford next week on his new artwork series which we will feature at Kate Vass Galerie in our upcoming show in July!
The event will take place on Thursday, June 25, 2020 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm and is open to everyone.
Additional details can be found on the Stanford official page of the event and for those interested in joining, they can RSVP here.
Alexander Reben’s work probes the inherently human nature of the artificial. Using tools such as artificial philosophy, synthetic psychology, perceptual manipulation and technological magic, he brings to light our inseparable evolutionary entanglement to invention which has unarguably shaped our way of being. This is done to not only help understand who we are, but to consider who we will become in our continued codevelopment with our artificial creations.
Alexander Reben is an artist and roboticist who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. Using “art as experiment” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts. “With a new generation of technology comes a new generation of scientists, scholars, engineers and artists exploring the relationship between people and machines. At the heart of this nexus is Alexander Reben, an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations,” reports NPR’s Tania Lombrozo. Reben’s artwork and research have been shown and published internationally, and he consults with major companies, guiding innovation for the social machine future. He has exhibited at venues including The Vitra Design Museum, The MAK Museum Vienna, The Design Museum Ghent, The Vienna Biennale, ARS Electronica, VOLTA, TFI Interactive, IDFA, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, Doc/Fest, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting and WIRED, among others. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT, and other universities. Reben has built robots for NASA, and is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, where he studied human-robot symbiosis and art. He is a 2016-2017 WIRED innovation fellow, a Stochastic Labs Resident, and a recent visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department.
KVG Virtual Artist Studio visit: meet & greet David Young!
We continue our virtual travel worldwide and are happy to release today the third KVG Virtual Artist Studio Tour! This time, David Young is inviting us to his farm in Bovina, NY, so everyone can discover the beauty behind his work.
David Young is an artist who has spent his entire career at the leading edge of emerging technologies. From projects using early supercomputers and the dawn of the web to contemporary global innovation and artistic initiatives, David has been a champion for new forms of creativity and expression enabled by technology.
His current work focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, asking if it is ‘inevitable that only our largest organizations, with their vast data sets, will decide how we will use AI? Will AI simply reinforce and accelerate the inequalities and biases that already polarize society and threaten our planet? What if, instead, we could start small? To work at the scale of the personal. To engage directly with AI. Could doing so allow us to develop new intuitions and understandings of what the technology is, and what it could enable?’
To David, beauty and aesthetic experiences are a powerful way to engage critically with technology.
By using intentionally small data sets, often photos taken from the rural context of his farm in upstate New York, David trains the machine to build a limited understanding of the natural world.
The work explores how aesthetic experiences can give a fresh start to how we think about artificial intelligence. And its scale highlights the irrationality of AI and its unique and unknowable materiality.
‘Learning Nature’ by David Young
Each book is signed and numbered as part of an edition of 100
Available at KVG online store
The Artist, writing about his Flowers and Winter Woods works -which are part of the ‘Learning Nature’ project - states: ‘Nothing that emerges is accurate, but the work isn’t asking for accuracy - it’s asking for the machine to build its own unique vision of the natural world.
What I’ve discovered, through the process of helping the machine learn nature, is that it is indeed a symbiotic process. The “artist” must tune the imagery that’s put into the “machine” to craft its interpretation of nature. And the artist must continue to select the work that the machine creates (much like photographers would use a contact sheet) in order to make the most unique, and frankly beautiful, interpretation of nature.’
“Training the machine with limited data reveals the irrationality, and the beauty, of AI.”
David Young is also interested in exploring the strangeness of how the machine learns and creates.
‘Given that we can’t help but use human terms to describe the behaviour of AI systems, might machine “emotions” be a new way for us to approach and understand AI? Could romanticism – emphasizing the free expression of the machine’s emotions as the most authentic source of aesthetic experience – be the foundation for a new AI aesthetic?
These images are an exploration of the materiality of AI. Treating the machine as a Tabula Rasa, or blank slate, I trained it with no more than a handful of images – solid colors or basic shapes. The resulting works ask us to consider the emotions that might be present in the machine as it creates.’
For more information we highly recommend reading his essay ‘Tabula Rasa’.
David’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions - including the Automat und Mensch show at Kate Vass Galerie - and magazines like ESPACE art actuel, IMPULSE - DAS MAGAZIN DER VOLKSWAGENSTIFTUNG and IEEE Computer Graphics magazine.
David Young
A Line is a Pixel Expressing Itself (m,b70h,9011,4-20,4,22,11,4,27-c), 2020
From the ‘Manipulations’ series
The works is available as unique NFT on the blockchain and as a print.
Kate Vass Galerie is glad to announce that selected works by David Young will be exhibited at CADAF Online next week, including one his latest pieces from the new series ‘Manipulations’ - Manipulated AI / Machine Learning generated images.
“We believe that the machine is creating images similar to what it was shown. But this prioritization on the visual reflects our own human biases and prejudices. The machine “sees” differently from us, and, so too, what it creates may not be entirely visible to our eyes. By manipulating the machine-created images I seek to reveal that which is not visible to us, but may be apparent, perhaps even obvious, to the machine. What are the hidden patterns, or the “irrational logic,” embedded within images created by the machine?”
David Young works are available as unique NFTs on the blockchain and as beautiful prints.
EDIGMA Semibreve Award 2020: Open Call for Artists
A new edition of the EDIGMA SEMIBREVE Award will take place in 2020, sponsored by EDIGMA.
EDIGMA SEMIBREVE Award is established to celebrate and promote the creation of works that explore the interactivity, sound and image supported through the use of digital technologies.
Applications are open until June 30th.
For more info about the award regulation and application please go to http://www.festivalsemibreve.com.
EDIGMA is an European company, based in Portugal, leader in the development of interactive experiences, multi-touch technology and digital signage projects.
SEMIBREVE Festival, has built a formidable reputation for being one of the most exciting annual events on the international exploratory music and digital arts calendar. In previous editions, Semibreve has presented unique collaborations by some of the most revered electronic music artists from around the word as well as presenting a programme of new work produced in the digital art’s field.
“Offset XYZ”, by German media artist Andreas Lutz was the winner of the 2019 EDIGMA SEMIBREVE Award:
http://andreaslutz.com/offset-xyz/
The winner will have the work exhibited during the 2020 edition of the SEMIBREVE festival and at EDIGMA’s showroom in Lisbon, Portugal.
We invite you to apply and spread the word!
New In: Osinachi series “COVID-19: A General State of Anxiety”
We are glad to announce that 3 brand-new cryptoworks by dear artist Osinachi have been released on SuperRare as NFTs as part of his specific series: “COVID-19: A General State of Anxiety”.
The works in the series engage with subjects who are navigating the realities of living in the global pandemic, COVID-19. Osinachi has documented history through this work, especially as it relates to how the pandemic has affected lives in his home country Nigeria.
The artworks specifically explore the various states of anxiety that has been prevalent as a response to the pandemic. For example, while some subjects are overwhelmed with ennui, others are looking for a way to stay alive during the pandemic – hence the embracing of spirituality/religiosity as means of salvation.
Osinachi, To Keep The Shower Running, 2020
This artwork references the psychological effects that being stuck in a space for too long could have on a person. From wiping down every surface to other heightened personal hygiene practices, there is a general sense of distrust between people and what they once regarded as their personal space. Given the realities of lockdowns, people are forced to lazy around indoors, most times leading to ennui.
The pieces are part of a larger exhibition at CADAF Online 2020 as facilitated by Kate Vass Galerie in collaboration with the artist.
Reserve price for the NFTs on SuperRare is 8 ETH each. There is also the option of buying the pieces as an NFT+print bundle, which would mean that the NFT would go for a discounted price.
Osinachi, Trust Doesn’t Matter Anymore, 2020
Osinachi, The Prophecy, 2020
The first work above, ‘Trust Doesn’t Matter Anymore’, is an interpretation of one of the most shared problems during the coronavirus pandemic – the inability of many people to get a haircut. Allowing someone to give you a haircut comes with heavy trust, with the pandemic, many people are forced to trash that trust and just go for it with whomever they can get to give them a haircut.
While for ‘The Prophecy’, Osinachi shares ‘When COVID-19 hit Nigeria, it was only a matter of time before people started seeking protection in religion. The wave has become so much so that while practitioners of African Traditional Religion claim to have a solution for anyone who gets infected, practitioners of Christianity are also selling the same message.’
More works to come, stay tuned! And do not miss CADAF online next week from June 25 until 28!
Sofia Crespo dEBUTS on SuperRare editorial
We are very happy to announce that our Artist Studio Visit with Sofia Crespo has been highlighted in the first SuperRare editorial. We would like to thank Super Rare Team for including us as a monthly contributor to its newly launched editorial. We are glad to introduce more artists through various content: interviews or videos with intent to enable people to get to know the artist and learn his/her practice.
At the following link you can read the article and watch the exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ video tour in case you missed it: https://editorial.superrare.co/2020/05/28/introducing-sofia-crespo-virtual-artist-studio-visit/
Sofia Crespo is a generative artist working with neural networks and machine learning with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies.
Sofia Crespo, hideseek_hope_9078
Laterally with Sofia’s introduction, several collaborative artworks were also feat. in the publication and now available on Superrare. For example, [[chromatophores]] project is an artwork resulted from the partnership with an engineer Andrew Pouliot and another fruitful collaboration with artist Dark Fractures is ‘Artificial Remnants’, an ongoing exploration in Artificial Life. This unique NFT ‘biomimicry_003’, a GAN generated sequence part of the Artificial Remnants project got recently acquired on SuperRare by artist Hackatao and we couldn’t be happier to see artists supporting each other!
Sofia Crespo, biomimicry_003
Sofia Crespo, hide&seek_bonding_9823
Sofia Crespo, radical_scyphozoa_love
Brand-new works from her latest series, including Neural Zoo, are now available as unique NFTs on both SuperRare and OpenSea, as well as beautiful prints in our online store.
Kate Vass Galerie is glad to present selected works by Sofia Crespo at the upcoming online art fair CADAF Online from June 25th until 28th, 2020.
Stay tuned and don’t’ miss it!
OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF our new video series as KVG Virtual Artist Studio visits - TODAY WITH SOFIA CRESPO FROM HER STUDIO IN BERLIN, GERMANY!
Starting today, we are launching our first video from our new series as KVG Virtual Artist Studio visits! Short films are created out of desire to give a sneak pick of how the artists work and talk about their practices.
Sofia Crespo is our first artist, inviting us on an exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ video tour of her studio!
Title: biomimicry_003
Year: 2020
Authors: Dark Fractures & Sofia Crespo
Series: Artificial Remnants
Technique: GANs
Duration: 00:04
‘Can we use new technologies to dream up biodiversities that do not exist ?’ - Sofia is a generative artist working with neural networks and machine learning with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques.
Sofia is guiding us through a little journey where you can get the amazing opportunity to see where and how she produces her work, with a special focus on her latest series Artificial Remnants developed together with artist Dark Fractures and ‘{}Chromatophores’ created with engineer Andrew Pouliot:
Title: chromatic_meditations()
Authors: Sofia Crespo & Andrew Pouliot
Year: 2020
Series: Chromatophores
Technique: GANs
Duration: 00:09
“The pigment-bearing organs, or chromatophores, that enable many cephalopods to change the colouring and patterns of their skin in order to camouflage themselves are thought not merely to increase the odds of survival, but also be a means of communication. These works are communicative meditation wherein the generative output of an aquatically trained neural
network is interacted with, and gently manipulated, so as to create a (bio)mimicry of multiple cells acting in concert to convey tonality, atmosphere and accentuation.”
Selected works from {}Chromatophores, Artificial Remnants and Neural Zoo projects are available for sale exclusively at Kate Vass Galerie store as unique works digitally and on the blockchain.
Sofia, recently interviewed by CLOT magazine, shares
‘… My work aims to visually understand the shapes of nature using new technologies such as deep learning. Working on Neural Zoo has led me to reflect on the meaning of creativity, the functioning of our visual cortex for pattern recognition, and the evolution of life in itself with its adaptations and challenges.
The fact that Neural Networks got abstractly inspired by the functioning of the visual cortex, led me to think about the flow of information in the creative process ie the way as a child I developed a phobia of jellyfish, which eventually became a fascination for the visual elements of the jellyfish and finally the focus of an artwork. I wondered if there’s a ‘dataset’ of human experiences in our brains, that we constantly filter through and rearrange, and that ‘rearranging’ of the elements into novel ones is what we refer to as creativity. No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine a colour that I haven’t previously seen, but I can imagine combinations of the ones I have seen, similarly, a neural network can’t create something out of the blue from a dataset that hasn’t been fed to it but it can recombine elements from data that has been given to it.’
Sofia Crespo
{unfolding_2121}, 2020
Neural Zoo series
Technique: Convolutional Neural Network
P.S. First of all, we would like to say thank you to Sofia for taking her time to invest in this project , it is a real pleasure to work with her and the works that she creates are absolutely stunning! Secondly, we would like to encourage everyone to place comments and questions to the artist after watching the “studio visit”, so we can follow up and respond to all in our next chapter with Sofia Crespo!
Enjoy it!
Kate Vass Team
Christie’s and Warhol Foundation to Present Photographs Sale for Coronavirus Relief
From the mountains of Colorado, to the beaches of Montauk, to the tulips lining New York City’s Park Avenue, Andy Warhol knew how to capture the beauty of the everyday scenes that surrounded him. Commonly known as the “Master of Pop,” Better Days features a different, but ever important, side of Warhol’s body of work. Christie’s is delighted to support the Andy Warhol Foundation’s recent emergency relief fund for artists through Better Days, featuring original photography by Warhol. Proceeds will contribute to the Foundation’s endowment, allowing it to support artist-centered organizations, the creation of new work, and projects that make significant contributions to the visual arts field. Let us transport you on Warhol’s travels across the country and bring you to “Better Days.”
“You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.” – Andy Warhol
Source: Christie’s
To the online-only sale & browse lots please visit: Andy Warhol: Better Days
sofia crespo artist studio visit - exclusive kate vass galerie series !
We are excited to launch our new series as KVG Virtual Artist Studio visits. Short films are created out of desire to give a sneak pick of how the artists work and talk about their practices. Usually, only few people get to know or have time to travel and visit the artists in person, we wanted to give an audience a taste of what it was like to meet the artists face to face, and get a snack-sized introduction to the artist’s world through a series of short, playful videos with still profound content.
We at Kate Vass Galerie are glad to share a short preview of what will come as our first virtual studio visit! Sofia Crespo is inviting us on an exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ video tour of her studio! Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques. Sofia will guide us through a little journey where we will get an amazing opportunity to see where and how she produces her work, with a special focus on her latest series ‘{}Chromatophores’ created together with engineer Andrew Pouliot:
“The pigment-bearing organs, or chromatophores, that enable many cephalopods to change the colouring and patterns of their skin in order to camouflage themselves are thought not merely to increase the odds of survival, but also be a means of communication. These works are communicative meditation wherein the generative output of an aquatically trained neural network is interacted with, and gently manipulated, so as to create a (bio)mimicry of multiple cells acting in concert to convey tonality, atmosphere and accentuation.”
Selected works from {}Chromatophores will be soon available for sale exclusively at Kate Vass Galerie as unique works digitally and on the blockchain.
Don’t miss it!
HAPPY EASTER! SPECIAL OFFER ON SELECTED WORKS
Easter has always been a moveable feast, but this year that takes on new meaning as many enjoy their Easter Sunday dinners virtually and bring the Easter egg hunts indoors. In this spirit, we have made a selection of some artworks that you can browse online and grant along the 10% discount as a gift for you, therefore to add those works to your existing collection or treat your loved ones with the special gift, or maybe start your collection now and benefit from the Easter offer!
The promo is valid from April 5th until April 25th, 2020 for all online purchases on our website. Check them out!
*Shipping worldwide is available, with little delays to some locations. We will gladly calculate best quote for you!
Happy Easter from Kate Vass Team!