No.31 The man is neither resting nor awake

How we collaborated with AI to create analogue art

You may recall I mentioned a collaboration in my last missive— I’m going to tell you all about it in today’s post.

It sprouted from a conversation with Toronto-based painter, Bogdan Luca, who had a few different ideas. The one that most intrigued me surfaced from the notion of describing visual art in words, as in writing the “alt text” for images, which I wrote about here. This can be particularly daunting for abstract or semi-abstract works— unless you approach it as making those descriptions into works of art in their own right*.

As a twist on this, we decided to create prompts for one another by enlisting that controversial entity known as Chat GPT. We each selected a work of our own to use as the basis:

1. Upload a jpg of selected painting

2. Ask Chat to describe the image in ~50 words

3. Trade the resulting descriptions

4. Make a new work using the description as prompt

I asked that it describe them to me in a narrative or storytelling way. It was fascinating to read the AI descriptions of my work. It honestly made me want to try it with loads more of my pieces. It felt like being able to see my works through someone else’s eyes, and emotional lens. Chat enjoyed the process, too†:

A point of interest in this collaboration is that the art Bogdan makes and the art I make are have little in common. My works are typically black and white or monochrome, inks on paper— whether its paintings, drawings or etchings.

Bogdan paints in the full spectrum of color, in oil paint, on canvases. His works are lush figurative works, imbued with lots of energy. He is an art educator, and there’s a background or basis of academic painting in his works, but tweaked or abstracted into the realm of disrupted realism.

Here’s how Chat GPT described the painting he uploaded:

The man is neither resting nor awake—he exists in a space between. His body reclines, but his mind drifts elsewhere, caught in the tangled web of memory and dream. The figure by the window is not a stranger, nor a friend, but a reflection of something lost. The room itself seems to breathe, shifting between the past and the present, between comfort and unease. This is not just a moment; it is the residue of moments, layered and fraying at the edges, like a story told too many times to remain whole.

Above is the painting I created in response to the description. I began this my pooling some black ink across the page, then sprayed it with water to get some of that atmospheric bleeding. During the course of working on it, I shifted into to a more traditional approach; my brain was focused on telling a specific story rather than following the ink’s inclinations.

It feels like an illustration for a story, doesn’t it? The room is quite large for that shrouded figure to seem so small, so far away. But this room has its own weather, which maybe has a distorting effect. Or maybe it’s the layering and fraying. I can’t help wondering what light source is illuminating the pillow.

Below is the painting that I uploaded for Chat to describe; a mixed media painting on paper from 2020.

A note on the process: Bogdan and I didn’t show each other the works we uploaded, we only shared the resulting descriptions. A point of curiosity in this was to see whether the description would prompts the creation of an image at all similar to the sight-unseen originals.

Only after we’d finished the new works did we share what we uploaded; that was part of the fun, seeing what AI chose to include or ignore in its brief descriptions. I couldn’t help thinking about how differently I would have described it— Oh! Maybe that can be a basis for another experimental collaboration.

Bogdan chose to work in mediums similar to what I use: ink, water, and pen— his aim was to get some of the atmospheric qualities in the paintings that accompanied the post that launched this idea.

To see the other half of this experiment, go to Bogdan’s corresponding post below, where he shares the works he made, the AI description of my painting, and the process of how he worked on his.

A gathering in the woods

As a post-script and perhaps as a thesis of this play: I found this whole process intriguing, challenging, and illuminating. It shows how much we tend to assume that our way of seeing something is only one of a million ways of seeing something, of ex-pressing— even when the story is told in a way that doesn’t seem that open-ended (to us). What our brains come up with is MAGIC. Because there are infinite possibilities of variation.

As ever, I appreciate your interest in my art, and reading about what I’ve been up to.

Let us know what you think of our AI-fueled collaboration!

x Liz

The footnotes:

*Interestingly, just yesterday I read a story here on Substack that seems based in this very same notion.

†Of course Chat GPT would love to write more of these—my image uploads are free training fodder for the next generation. That thought quickly curbed my temptation, and is the reason I don’t allow full access of my photos to instagram or whatsapp.