Nov 162023
 

Scott Eaton giving Out of Distribution talk at View Conference 2023Talking about the making of Spherical Enumeration

I recently gave a talk at the VIEW Conference, in Turin, titled:

Out of Distribution: Thriving Creatively in the Age of AI

The talk gives my current take on the state of AI and how we, as artists and creatives, need to think about situating our work in relationship to this ever-more-disruptive technology. (the talk now available on-demand on the VIEW Conference’s plaform here). The talk blurb:
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Oct 312023
 

Scot Eaton's Anatomy Courses, image of Houdon Ecorche and anatomy booksScott’s Eaton-Houdon écorché


SPRING SESSIONS

Enrollment is open for the Spring sessions of my anatomy and figure sculpting courses. These in-depth courses are designed to teach the skills every artist needs to produce inspiring, professional figurative work. The courses have been taught to artists and studios around the world, including Pixar, Industrial Light & Magic, Disney Feature Animation, Sony, Warner Bros, Ubisoft, Blizzard, EA and many others. If you are looking for an intensive course to level up your figurative art skills, consider one of these:
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Jul 022023
 

Intersections on the Living Canvas, Dublin

I recently presented a new talk titled, “Inside Pandora’s Box: Bodies, Geometry and Internet-scale Intrigue” for Google. Here’s the description:

“In this richly visual presentation, Scott takes us on a journey through five years of creative experimentation with machine learning and AI in his artistic practice. He shares the progression of his projects, from initial sketches and concepts to fully realized artistic pieces, recalling the iterations, side quests and failures along the way. Scott concludes by delving into ‘internet-scale’ models, revealing intriguing cultural artifacts discovered within CLIP networks and Stable Diffusion. While recognizing the immense potential AI offers to artists, he also worries for the future of creative employment and the blind spots inherent in the technology.”

I’ll try to share some of the content and interesting experiments here soon. If you’re out there and interested in this talk for your org, please get in touch. Finally – the banner image teases a new work, Intersections, that is having it’s international debut in Time Square, NYC for the month of August 2023. More details on that soon.

Mar 222023
 

I am excited to be running a series of figure drawing workshops for the Victoria & Albert Museum in conjunction with their landmark Donatello, Sculpting the Renaissance exhibition. The first workshop has passed, and was great fun, but we will be running a second workshop on Saturday, June 10th (the day before the Donatello exhibition closes). I give an introduction to drawing digitally (ipads/apple pencils) and cover some anatomical fundamentals before we explore the impressive sculpture collection at the V&A – works from Rodin, Canova, Leighton, Dalou, Giambologna, and others.

Cast court at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Casts of Michelangelo's David and Slaves.V&A Cast Court

We end with a long afternoon drawing session in the museum’s fabled Cast Courts. If you haven’t been to the Cast Courts, they are, like many things at the V&A, grand relics of 19th century Victorian England. They house myriad plaster casts of masterworks ranging from a full-sized replica of Trajan’s column (in two parts), to Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, to many works by Michelangelo, including a 1:1 cast of David. An inspiring setting for drawing practice!

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Mar 102023
 

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Whew, just finished eight weeks of anatomy lectures for Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio behind my favorite animated film of all time – Spiderman Into the Spiderverse.
Over thirteen lectures we covered the essential anatomy of the human figure from head to toe (artistic anatomy mind you, not medical anatomy, so no guts etc.). It was an intensive combination of my two, longer, online anatomy courses – Anatomy for Artists and Portraiture & Facial Anatomy, delivered remotely packaged as two lectures per week. I’ve been weary of delivering workshops over Zoom versus in-person, but the convenience for the studio, with respect to timing and geography, is definitely hard to beat. If you’re a studio interested in similar workshops, feel free to get in touch.

Mar 092022
 

Imitation Game AI Exhibition Poster, Vancouver Art GalleryEntangled II at The Imitation Game

I am excited to have a number of works on display at the recently-opened feature exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, “The Imitation Game – Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

the venerable Vancouver Art Gallery

The show promises to be groundbreaking and gives insight into the development and impact artificial intelligence is having on art, creativity, and wider visual culture. I have a collection of large pieces in the show as well as a series of development ‘sketches’ that are being shown in public for the first time. If you’re near Vancouver definitely check it out, the show will be running until October 23, 2022!

Scott Eaton's Humanity (Fall of the Damned) at the Vancouver Art Gallery Humanity (Fall of the Damned)

Mar 092022
 

I recently hosted artists from Industrial Light & Magic’s London and Singapore studios for a three-day Essential Anatomy workshop online. The goal was to go in-depth into a few challenging areas of the body needing special attention for their upcoming projects – facial anatomy and expressions, shoulders and neck, and forearms & hands.
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Jun 102020
 

CogX 2020 – Artist Vs Machine

I will be participating in a three-artist discussion panel at CogX 2020 on the future of creativity and art in the age of AI, VR, and AR. I will be joined by Jonathan Yeo, contemporary portrait painter, and Patrick Morgan, an artist exploring the boundaries of VR/AR in his work. The conversation will be wide ranging, but focused around how these emerging technologies might enable new creative horizons for aritsts in the coming decades.

Mar 202020
 

My webinar, hosted by Nvidia, is now available on-demand. I talk about my latest work using AI (machine learning) as a “creative collaborator” in my artistic process. I show an eclectic range of successes, failures, and just crazy experiments that I’ve done over the last few years while exploring the capabilities and limitations of this emerging technology.

Free to register and watch.

WATCH HERE

Feb 162020
 

respawn reception logoRespawn reception on Valentine’s day

Pathfinder, from Apex LegendsI’ve recently returned to soggy London from ever-sunny (but windy) Los Angeles where I ran an intensive facial anatomy course for the artists at Respawn Entertainment (an EA studio). For those who don’t know their work, their freshman release was an epic mech game called Titanfall, followed by its sequel. Then in 2019 they release two huge titles – the run-away hit Apex Legends, a Fortnight styled battle royale game, and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, an, umm, Star Wars game.
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Dec 132019
 

Oxford University campusThe spires of Oxford

I’m just back from a trip to Oxford where I gave an afternoon seminar on my explorations with art and machine learning to an amazing group of researchers and distinguished professors at Oxford University. The talk reviewed the last three years of my artistic experimentation using machine learning (AI) as a creative tool for art making and showcased an eclectic range of successes and failures. I’ve been sharing some of the work here, but mostly finished pieces, so it was nice to dust off some of my earlier, formative experiments from the recesses of my hard drive. I’ll try to start uploading more of these here in the coming months. Even though they’re unfinished, they were important developmental milestones and each succeeded/failed in interesting, instructive ways. Stay tuned…

Special thanks to Prof. Alexei Efros for arranging the visit. It was great to chat ML, tech and art with a group of super-smart computer scientists, engineers, and thinkers.

crisp winter day in Oxford

Oct 082019
 

Scott Eaton giving creative AI lecture MaltaStill from ‘Entangled II’

I was privileged to be invited to speak again at the THU conference in Malta, this time on the main stage talking about my explorations using machine learning (AI) as a ‘creative collaborator’ in my artistic process. The talk, weighing in at a hefty 75 minutes, explored the genesis of this body of work, my early steps (and missteps) in this emerging medium, and how I’ve started integrating it into my artistic practice.

Scott Eaton Figures & Form AI lectureHyperbolic Composition I with drawing underlaid (left)

The talk included a behind-the-scenes look at the inspiration, production and labour that went into the pieces for the Artist+AI: Figures and Form exhibition. I was also excited to show, for the first time, a number of my fun, early experiments that compelled me to dig deeper into the potential of these new tools.

Scott with mind map planning the Figures & Form exhibitionAI musings from a sketchbook
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