Infinity came up this morning. First the question, what does it mean when the word is used as an adjective, then the curiosity to imagine what infinity means within my so-finite life lived under “the constraint of time.”
Stardust Portrait No.11595
I needed some uplifting this morning and participated in Sergio Albiac’s Stardust Portrait experiment using generative strategies to create art. He aims to “produce as many artworks as possible (during a limited time, beginning 18th of June 2013). An automated process will create human portraits as generative collages.”
I uploaded an unflattering selfie to my Google Drive cloud and a portrait was regenerated from images of space taken by the Hubble. I am drawn in stardust and bubbles of interstellar gases, my left eye revealed! The image generated is available to me in 3 versions on my Google Drive. Having spent my teen years obsessively reading science fiction (the way I now read mysteries), to see myself in stars—in space—I’m thrilled by this visualization.
Generated portraits are now exhibited at the flickr Stardust Portrait exhibition. These portraits are haunting and beautiful; this is a gift from the artist, an experience that money won’t buy. We see ourselves imagined differently, both by a distinctive notion and a different technique, imagined and drawn in infinite light.
I like the perspective of being stardust. I see myself in a new light—starlight—but I wish I had sent my glam shot instead. I’m portrait number 11595.
Participation is free; you need to have a Google account. Instructions are on the site.
Albiac: “What if we use technology to outsource the creation of art so more of these potential artworks are finally created? Modelling artistic decisions into software would provide a generative assistant that could even survive an artist in the creation of meaningful works of visual art. This project is a first experiment around this concept.”
– Roberta Fountain
Stardust Portrait No.11581
Stardust Portrait No.11576 (Doesn’t he look like Messi?)