Face-o-mat Apprentice
Teaching a Machine Art
In der Zusammenarbeit mit dem Künstler Tobias Gutmann versuchen wir das vermeintlich Unmögliche: Wir rekreieren den Künstler selbst. Wir bringen einem Computer — dem Face-o-mat Apprentice — das Zeichnen bei mit Machine Learning. Als Basis dienen tausende Portraits, die Tobias Gutmann als nomadische Portraitmaschine «Face-o-mat» bereits erstellt hat. Dazu ist er um die Welt gereist und hat die Menschen, die ihm begegneten, mit seinem idiosynkratischen, abstrakten Stil erfasst. Mit dem Face-o-mat Apprentice ist die Maschine zum Lehrling des Künstlers geworden.
Machine Poetry
The project spawns questions about creativity and the intuitive. By attempting to parametrise and model the artist Gutmann and David Simon from Lucid explore the question of distinction between human and machine understanding. What role does human error play? Can a machine‘s failure be just as poetic? These are questions surrounding contemporary art practice but also point to larger political debates. A.I. is everywhere: The promise of Artificial Intelligence is alluring and threatening at the same time. Machine Learning brings us closer and closer to a point, where it is difficult to make a distinction between human and machine comprehension. Does machine learning generate „knowledge“? Absurdly we need to ask: Can machines have knowledge, but not understand that knowledge? But like „machine knowledge“, human knowledge is just as arcane and mysterious as the enormous matrices of numbers we receive from machine as they learn to play chess, drive cars or paint. Therein lies the crux: We ascribe human knowledge an intrinsic, poetic quality, yet we intuitively discard any poetic, artistic potential in machine knowledge. Can there be more to it?
– Tobias Gutmann & David Simon
