AI art has been making waves, albeit small pixelated ones, for over a year.
Sotheby’s auction house has tried to cash in on the new technology this week by selling a work by Mario Klingemann called Memories of Passerby I.
The piece is a two screen installation, where surreal imaginary portraits are projected on the screens by neural networks. The computer generates new faces as you look at it, based on thousands of photographs of portraits from 17th and 19th centuries. The portraits blur around the edges creating an endless stream of distorted faces, which were inspired by Klingemann’s penchant for Surreal artists Max Ernst.
Sotheby’s follows in the footsteps of New York auction house Christie’s, which sold Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, an algorithm-generated print in the style of a 19th century portraiture for $432,500.
In comparison Klingemann’s AI installation went for a seemingly paltry £32,000, selling in under a minute to an unknown online bidder.
Sotheby’s quotes Andre Breton’s ‘Surrealist Manifesto’ in relation to the pioneering technology behind AI art: “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.”
Perhaps AI art is still too ‘convulsive’ to appeal to a mainstream perception of beauty.
