Showing a recent piece, 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. Here’s the talk blurb:
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Intersections, Times Square NYC
I am excited to announce that one of my recent experimental works, Intersections, has debuted in Times Square in August as part of their Midnight Moments series. For the entire month of August, the piece will take over 90+ screens across Times Square at 11:57-00:00 each night.
A bit about Intersections:
An experimental work reflecting on technology and complexity. The piece evolved from a single QR code photographed in a dirty alley, advertising an event long past. This source image, a simple but iconic reminder of our data-saturated existence, is distorted and remixed through layers of random processes using animation and machine learning. The original data is completely transformed into a cascading landscape of evolving geometry, structured but abstract and unpredictable, intermittently evoking ideas of the towering architecture, Art Deco, and endless city blocks of New York City. The result is a meditation on the complexity and unknowability of the digital landscapes that surround us.
Enrollment is open for the Winter 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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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.
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.
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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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.
Meta AI
I recently completed a year-long artist residency with Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Lab (FAIR). While I’ve always had mixed feelings about corporate Meta (formerly Facebook), I have nothing but respect for the research that FAIR does in AI and machine learning. It was a privilege to spend time within that organisation pursuing a number of interests in art, creativity, and machine learning.
The work was largely experimental, often extensions of explorations I had started prior, but I appreciated having the time and resources (read: compute) to investigate more deeply. The work included investigations into human pose estimation and tracking, interpretability of vision models, geometric abstraction, color theory, and generative networks. The focus was not so much on advancing any state of the art in machine learning, but more on utilizing and extending existing ML tools and techniques to make new creative works. I will post a few of the more interestesting experiments here when I find time.
a still from Perpetual Now II, Living Canvas, Dublin, 2022
One of the moving image pieces created during the residency recently finished a three month run on the Living Canvas in Dublin Ireland (the largest outdoor cultural screen in Europe, approximately 4x20m, see above). A second work, Intersections, will premiere in New York City later in 2023.
Bandai Namco
I recently completed an intensive facial anatomy workshop for the wonderful character artists at Bandai Namco. If you don’t know Bandai Namco, their game development DNA goes all the way back to the original Pac-Man, developed by Namco and released to the arcade in 1980 (!). Clearly Pac-man doesn’t require much facial anatomy expertise, but if we fast forward to the work the studio does today, it features character-heavy titles from the Tekken and Soul Caliber franchises, amongst many others. Over five days we covered the fundamentals of facial anatomy and the artists spend their evenings grinding away on sculpting exercises (in Zbrush) with reference from the BodiesinMotion.photo expression library. If you’re interested in a similar workshop, feel free to get in touch
Entangled 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!
Humanity (Fall of the Damned)
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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link to gallery
For the last couple of years, I have been fortunate to be curated in Nvidia’s AI Art Gallery. There are a couple of recent works featured there (which are already familiar to anyone who has explored this site) but each has additional background and context. You can also find a couple of recorded discussions I’ve had with other amazing artists creating in this space. These are available for viewing at the bottom of the gallery page (link here).