I am excited to announce that one of my experimental moving image pieces, Intersections, debuted in Times Square in August 2023 as part of their Midnight Moments series. For the entire month the piece took over 90+ screens across Times Square at 11:57-00:00 each night.
More images and details HERE.
Entangled II at The Imitation Game
I am excited to have an entire room dedicated to my artwork 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 groundbreaking show 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!
Caffeinated Diversions, 2019
A wall of displays showing Scott’s machine learning video works
Humanity (Fall of the Damned)
Ange Cire Perdue, clear and red crystal, 73 cm, image © Lalique
I was recently commissioned by the legendary French glass makers, Lalique, to design and sculpt an enormous (in relative terms) crystal angel, an allegory of Music, for Elton John. The piece, know as Cire Perdue (after the lost wax process Lalique used to cast the piece), is a single, unique artwork that will be auctioned off in Los Angeles in February, with all proceeds going to the Elton John Aids Foundation. After a long design process and an even longer time in production, the piece is finally finished and was shown for the first time at Elton’s Windsor estate, to an effusive reaction:
“I don’t think that I have ever seen a more beautiful piece of glass than the big Angel. It is breathtaking!
-Elton John
Elton signing the big Angel
Designing a sculpture for casting in crystal is challenging because there are many considerations the medium demands:
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I have a new work debuting at the Alon Zakaim Gallery in central London in April. This exhibition pairs contemporary artists (me and others, mostly painters) with works from 20th century artists – Picasso, Dali, Chagall, etc – and asks us to react with a new, contemporary take.
I am paired with a larger than life-sized alabaster bust from Jaume Plensa, a Spanish artist known for his large scale portraits, often compressed in one dimension. My ‘reaction’ is a moving image piece – an aging, kaleidoscopic, digital portrait that borrows stylistic elements from early 20th century art movements (cubism, constructivism) and remixes these with a recipe of photogrammetry, digital sculpture, machine learning and rendering. The work – flat, colorful, evolving and ephemeral – is a counterpoint to the static, polished, ageless bust of Plensa. Hopefully when appreciated together, they contrast and compliment each other, sparking conversation. Images to follow after the opening.
Curated by Virginia Damtsa
Scott’s Eaton-Houdon écorché
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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Talking 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:
In this densely illustrated talk, Scott explores how we can maximize our human creative potential in the face of the tidal wave of capabilities from the latest AI tools. He explores the trajectory of the field of AI, covering the critical ideas that have led us to where we are now. He asks the question on everyone’s mind – what space will be left for artists and creatives as more powerful AI inevitably arrives, and how should we think about situating our work and careers in the face of this constantly accelerating technology? Scott showcases his recent projects and gives examples and anecdotes from his own work with machine learning over the past seven years, including a behind-the-scenes look at his recent takeover of Times Square.
Talking about the importance of drawing in one’s creative practice. Mini-me and large me, juxtaposed.
I recently presented a new talk titled “Inside Pandora’s Box: Bodies, Geometry and Internet-scale Intrigue” for Google. Here’s the description:
Intersections on the Living Canvas, Dublin
“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.
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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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.
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.