Sprice Studio - RXCX SERIES

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INTRODUCTION

The RXCX series is the culmination of a multi-year, derivative chain of projects. The collages emerged from the use of human and computer pareidolia as an artistic tool.

We may have evolved pareidolia to build adaptive associations with uncertain landscapes. But our future capabilities for creative expression will increasingly allow us to reverse this equation — to evolve environment from mind.

This series explores how art and technology increasingly converge in this aim. I endeavor to experiment with information loss, since our journey towards instant materialization of thought demands precision.

Learn more about each stage of development below.

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STAGE I: HOLD BACK

My painting process begins with a black canvas, a dark plane that contains every visual possibility. After adding color to frame the void, I rely on my perceptions to seek out new entities to clarify.

Suspending this work at an early stage of this progression, I hoped this ambiguous look would foster rich visual interpretation.

I divided this painting into sections and ran each through a neural network, tasking a computer program with interpreting their abstract imagery.

Painting Timelapse

STAGE II: MONKEY LOGIC

The program sourced visual inspiration from a dataset containing millions of stock photos, of thousands of object types. As such, images that emerge possess more “realistic” elements, allowing for flexible transitions of abstraction into visuals that possessed uncanny, lifelike features.

The output images were shown to viewers. Each hovered their mouse over the squares that most closely mirrored one of the nine painting sections. More rounds would follow with new images, whose look was influenced by the visuals of interest in the last round.

Stage III: The Audience Becomes the Artist

The most relevant images to my audience were collected into a 13 minute projection, paralleling the original painting.

Minidoc on Stages I-III

STAGE IV: RXCX

My trials produced thousands of novel images. Each is a middle ground between abstraction and representation, making them ideal puzzle pieces for larger digital collages. In this latest derivative series of works, I reclaim my creative role, using my own pareidolia to connect my associations of different textures into cohesive, impressionist VR landscapes.

The results mirror the look of space photography, in which massive pictures of the most distant features we can measure are assembled into larger, coherent images. Nothing is darker than space. Exploring it parallels the creative process, as both are acts of drawing out clarity from an ambiguous background.