The Em series is a set of works made with the aid of, or inspired by the output of, my pet Neural Network AI. The origin of the “Em” prefix is somewhat obscured in the mists of time, but has it’s origins in with its sister project The University of Wilmarth, which also gets its imagery from the same AI. It doesn’t have any meaning any more. The numerical suffix for each sub-collection however simply relates to the size of the artworks in inches2.
The images by training my pet AI, a highly constrained neural network autoencoder on a random selection of photos from a large collection that I have amassed that consists of images of movie stars, landscapes, text, diagrams, other artworks, plants etc., anything really. Once trained, the model attempts to reconstruct these images from memory. The results you see are it failing to do so successfully.
The process consists of instructing the machine on how many images to choose, and then tinkering with the construction and tuning of the neural network, which produces different results each time. The fun comes from tinkering with different approaches and seeing what comes out!
I generate many hundreds of these images, and choose the the ones that really scream at (or scare!) me.
For a more detailed explanation of this process, go here.
Apart from a few, the artworks are square and are made to be shown in grids. They are all made with acrylic paints on hand-stretched canvas with some also incorporating mixed-media collage, often using printouts of the AI produced images.
The orignals of many of these are available on my Etsy shop.
Em 8 Series
Em 15 Series
Em 20 Series
