Guess, check and fix: a phenomenology of improvisation in ‘neural’ painting

ABSTRACT

The parameter space offered by neural network image synthesis offers a creative environment that is little understood and quite literally emergent. In an attempt to come to terms with this space, an artist enters into an improvisational reflection on ‘neural painting’, made possible with what are called style transfer algorithms (Gatys, Leon A., Alexander S. Ecker, and Matthias Bethge. 2015. “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style.” ArXiv: 1508.06576 [Cs, q-Bio], August. http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576) Artistic painting offers access to transitional states existing at the interstices of expression and reflection in the creative process. Of all the conceptual dimensions offered by neural style transfer models (where the ‘content’ of one source is blended with the ‘style’ of another), the convolutional blending of ‘content weight’ offers a fertile metaphor for artistic painting phenomenology, providing a tool for the investigation of stylistic schema in the iterative, improvisational movement from concept to representation. A preliminary phenomenological framework describing the process of neural painting is developed, offering an art-as-research perspective on intersubjectively positioned creativity support technology.

KEYWORDS:

• Art process
• embodied cognition
• reflective practice
• AI art
• J. G. Ballard

Notes on contributor

Suk Kyoung Choi is a Korean artist and researcher working in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She is currently a PhD student at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University and a member of iViz lab (http://dipaola.org/lab/) with PI Dr Steve DiPaola. Choi’s work examines metaphors of process in order to understand the nature of embodied transformation between experience and knowledge. Her artistic work has been shown in Seoul, London, Calgary, Chicago and Vancouver.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank foremost her graduate supervisor, Dr Steve DiPaola, for research support and guidance. Additionally, gratitude is due to her colleagues at iViz lab particularly Graeme McCaig, and Summer 2017 undergraduate research assistant Hanieh Shakeri, who have contributed with debate, thoughtful observation and technical prowess to the development of this methodology. The author also expresses thanks to the members of Poodleforum.com for their delightful assistance tracking down Brazilian photographer Johnny Duarte (http://www.fotoanimal.com.br/), who graciously granted permission to use his wonderful Poodle image in this paper. Finally, I hope Rembrandt is not displeased with artificial intelligence research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Suk Kyoung Choi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4458-3167

Notes

1. Rather, ‘style’ is, I would suggest, informed—by situated experience.

2. The contextual relevance of perturbation in improvisation is discussed in Section 4.

3. See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Improvisation, n.2.,” Accessed December 4, 2017, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/92872.

4. See also https://www.jackson-pollock.org/.

5. But see also Lakoff and Johnson ([1980] 2003) for a related approach through metaphor theory.

6. See, e.g. Reingold (n.d.).

7. Dunne ([1999] 2005) first pointed out that we move not only through physical space but that our movements are simultaneously constrained by an invisible electronic landscape that permeates the physical one. See also Mitchell (2003, Prologue).

8. Daniel Dennett’s ‘third person phenomenology’ stresses that to study subjectivity seriously we need to take first-person reports as objective data, as reports about ‘what it is like’ to experience something. See Dennett (2003).

9. Here, I appropriate Gibson’s sense of the ‘optic array’, but extend it to the realm of themes and concepts held within improvisational space.

10. Interview at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (n.d.).

11. ‘en plein air’: (French) simply, ‘outside’—as a metaphor for ‘real’ experience in the world.

12. Here, I use Dunne’s ([1999] 2005) terminology because I believe it evokes more of the felt, embodied dimension of the liminal spaces we inhabit than the closely related term ‘digital environment’, and preserves the poetic urgency of media permeating walls and flesh.