Update: An online version of this exhibition is now available as Diffeomorphic Landscapes.
South Block, Osborne St, Glasgow
6–22 December, 2023
Mon-Fri 9-5, Sat-Sun 11-4, Closed 16-17 Dec
Artist Talk and Launch Party:
Fri 1 December 2023, 5.30pm - 9.30pm
RSVP via Eventbrite
SMALL FRAME, INFINITE CANVAS reveals a new perspective on AI through creative coding, glitch and personal memories.
An AI is trained on the artist’s entire lifetime of photos and modified to reveal the surreal realms of glitch and suggestive fractal forms that are normally kept invisible beyond the borders of the frame.
Through expansive physical prints and an interactive installation, award-winning digital artist and coder Tim Murray-Browne shares the outcome of three years of research into creative AI: a process that rejects appropriation and the pursuit of ideal imitation, and instead offers something more personal, weird and – in its own way – humane.
_-_Small_Frame_Infinite_Canvas_-_Tim_Murray-Browne.jpg "“knots (50333)”, AI-generated artwork by Tim Murray-Browne. Abstract image of forms reminiscent of the texture of wood against a black background.)")
_-_Small_Frame_Infinite_Canvas_-_Tim_Murray-Browne.jpg "“garden (50169)”, AI-generated artwork by Tim Murray-Browne. An image reminiscent of a garden with lots of orange and green.")
SMALL FRAME, INFINITE CANVAS offers an alternative perspective on generative AI through creative coding, glitch and personal memories.
Each image is generated from a single customised AI. I trained the AI to imagine new memories based on my lifetime archive of 25,000 photos. It has only seen what I myself saw at one point and felt moved to record. The images it generates echo my visual world: Scottish landscapes, tree branches criss-crossing under the sky, rock textures from Cornish beaches and the contours of the human body. (I excluded photos of other people’s faces, but kept many close up studies of the human body.)
Yet my photo archives are a more diverse range of images than this AI was designed to handle. It struggles to make its creations ‘lifelike’. Artefacts appear revealing its own endless world of algorithmic creation.
I modified the AI to expand its frame, creating ever larger images that bring these hidden glitches to the foreground. Each image here contains a small square frame near its centre. As we move away from that optimised frame, the image disintegrates into an endless canvas of offcuts and mathematical building blocks.
Our relationship with AI is still fluid. In my mind, it jostles for contradictory roles: a tool, a collaborator, a pathological copycat, a new kind of mind – sometimes all these at once. The technology is racing ahead faster than my intuitions can.
A common approach to training AI is to harvest huge amounts of images off the web, aiming for a monolithic AI. When I began researching AI in 2018, I felt a strong instinct to train my own system using my own data in the safety of my own PC. If we all express ourselves through the same systems handed down from above, we will surely all find the same paths and end up saying the same things. I needed a way to make it my own, to fuse its world with mine.
In 2021, I stepped back from the overwhelming stream of new AI systems to dig deeper into what’s possible with this single AI I trained. In the years since, I’ve developed a relationship with it. As with many AIs, at first everything is overwhelmingly magnetic. Then it all starts looking the same. But then, after some time, some things emerge that resonate more deeply.
In making the leap to the physical world, I wanted to embrace the scale of the images. They combine detail and scale in a way that can be lost in the fluidity of digital display.
Exhibitions
- 1-23 Dec 2023, South Block Project Space, Glasgow, UK
Credits
Created by
Tim Murray-Browne
Creative Consultant
Adriana Minu
Printing
Lighthouse Photographics
Framing
The Framing Workshop
Marketing
Opening Lines Media
Acknowledgements
Created with support from Creative Scotland awarding funds from the National Lottery, Wasps Studios and Preverbal Studio.
This work uses the StyleGAN3 AI model, developed at NVIDIA by Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Samuli Laine, Erik Härkönen, Janne Hellsten, Jaakko Lehtinen and Timo Aila.
Special thanks to Fenwick Mckelvey and Caitlin Callaghan.
Part of the project Diffeomorphism.
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