Teacher Name: Devan Picard
Grade: Senior
Materials: Generative Adversarial Network, Photoshop
Dimensions: 10″ x 10″
Description: “To each their own” has the intention of conveying the inherent contradictions of the world we’re living in. This has been a paradoxical time for our generation, especially for us teenagers—in a way, the pandemic was the most connected we’ve ever been because of the internet and social media, yet it was also marked by political polarization, social isolation, and general unrest. Figures in the work can be seen in an abstract and ambiguously connected landscape but are obviously secluded from one another, attending to their own devices. This work projects loneliness, even in the hyper-connected world we’re living in. This is indicative of our collective experience during the pandemic.
Artist Statement: Our relationship with digital technology is a polarizing topic fraught with issues and nuances. On one hand, technology can have negative effects on our physical and mental health, alienate us from one another, and perpetuate hegemony. On the other hand, it helps us break down barriers, connect with one another, and find novel ways to express ourselves. As a child of Nepali immigrants who grew up in a nuclear family, my relationship with technology began over long-distance Skype calls with close relatives thousands of miles away. From a young age, I recorded videos on my parents’ phones and created movies using iMovie. My attempts at digital art started as a preoccupation with Microsoft Paint, evolved into works in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Blender, and led to my current works, which include coding, artificial intelligence, and many other software and digital tools I have learned over the years. I feel that digital art helps me connect with the world around me and gives me novel ways to communicate my thoughts and ideas, using the skills and interests I have cultivated so far. I had never imagined that I would eventually be creating art using artificial intelligence generative networks in addition to freehand illustration and digital software. But in working with AI, I have come to realize that producing images that are unpredictable, even to me, satisfies my inexplicable desire to explore the fantastical, the mythical, and the unknown. My process makes use of millions of collective images and draws from diverse disciplines such as computer science, psychology, and statistics. It connects me to the larger world in unprecedented ways and helps me understand it better. My process is part of my content and the ultimate works that I produce often encompass the ambivalent nature of the ubiquitous, ever-advancing technology around us.
The selection of artworks in my portfolio includes all works created using artificial intelligence and an iterative process that guides me toward my vision for the work. Through these pieces, I seek to explore my ideas and thoughts about the world using specific prompts. My custom Python script outputs images given the inputted text prompts by accessing machine learning networks that imitate human cognitive patterns. In a process modeled by game theory, a generative network outputs images that are evaluated by a discriminative network. The generative network aims to convince the discriminator network that its outputs match the text prompt. My vision for each piece informs the text prompts I test in my script; I experiment with various tricks in the text prompts, drawing from both my artistic and analytical minds. An inherent condition of this process is that no two outputs can be the same, so there is an element of uncertainty and unpredictability in each of the pieces. Ultimately, I select an image that matches my vision in its emotional tenor, from any one of the iterated images outputted in my process. Finally, I overlay my own illustrations, superimpose 3D objects made using CGI programs, and add or modify colors using digital software. In this selection of works, I have explored a breadth of artistic styles including abstract, realistic, surrealistic, modern, sci-fi, dystopian, and cosmic while keeping within the theme of the fantastic, illusionary, and mythical. The selected works bear many references to art history, literature, myths, and religions.
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