Last week we took a close look at Denis Shiryaev's project that transforms and animates the faces of classic paintings, and the results were extraordinary. However, Denis is not the only one interested in combining art with artificial intelligence. Today it's the turn of Bas Uterwijk, an independent photographer from Amsterdam who uses generative adversarial networks to create "realistic portraits" of historical figures, paintings, statues, and even video game characters..
When articles about artificial intelligence and its potential applications first started circulating, art didn't appear very high on the list of priorities. But a Google experiment with its networks opened up a wide range of possibilities, and since then projects have multiplied. Today, an AI can write songs and movie scripts (or at least try). It can also create faces from nothing, turn them into anime characters, and extract them from pixelated images.
But in these last days we noticed another trend: developing "real" versions of faces in famous paintings and statues. That's how we arrived in Amsterdam, where independent photographer Bas Uterwijk is based. With the help of the artificial intelligence platform Artbreeder, which offers a large number of interpretations of an image, Uterwijk created a series of portraits that he then edits and optimizes on his own. This allows for a certain artistic freedom, since the photographer chooses details like hair and eye color for the statues, but the amount of material loaded into Artbreeder is equally important.
For example, Uterwijk explains that in the case of Queen Elizabeth I of England, there are multiple works about her, and by loading ten different images he managed to obtain a more "realistic" version from the average. Artbreeder combines the technologies of the open projects GANBreeder and BigGAN, and it's open to the public. Who knows? With enough training and the right editing, maybe you can achieve results similar to Uterwijk's at home.
If you want to know more about Bas Uterwijk's work (including those projects not related to artificial intelligence), don't hesitate to visit his Instagram profile and his official page.
