Curious as to what artificial intelligence technology could do, Amelia Eady asked an AI image-to-image generator to make her beautiful.
She uploaded an image of herself in a costume she had designed and let technology do its thing.
"It stripped off all my clothes, gave me gigantic boobs and I was like well, this is interesting."
So she decided to continue the conversation with the AI and sent it a series of different prompts such as "make me powerful", "make me as powerful as a man".
"From there the tits got bigger, bigger and bigger."
While she could see the funny side — "I was like if that is where the power lies then I’m f...ed" — it also generated a great deal of concern.
"It’s very scary."
AI applications use data from various sources including publicly available data, databases and websites.
The final-year Dunedin School of Art (DSA) student decided to research the influence of pornography on AI for her "Site" project.
"Then I realised that it [pornography] is estimated to be 30% of all internet content, and so I feel like that’s where AI gets its interpretation of beauty and the word beautiful."
Even putting the word "naked" into a text-to-image generator brought up images of stereotypical slim, beautiful women.
"Sometimes I’d end up with three [breasts], which is crazy."
Inspired by the work of Canadian artist Beth Fray and American artist Stephanie Pierce among others, Eady, who is from Dunedin and grew up around art at home, decided to 3-D print six images of women AI had created, as a critique and warning of the biases inherent in AI.
"What I’ve got here is just the importance of considering ethical guidelines and diverse data sources in the development of AI.
"To ensure an unbiased and accurate representation of humanity, because I feel like AI, from my understanding, is a mirror to human depravity."
She used text-to-image, image-to-image and then image-to-3-D AI to create the models.
"I kind of pushed it further and further until I ended up with these monstrous feminine-looking figures."
Eady, who is thinking of returning to do further study after a gap year to travel and work to save money, thought the process would be easy and she would be able to print the entire figure in one go.
However, the cost of that was too high, so she had to set up a production line of 3-D printers to print sections of the figurines from a cornstarch-based plastic filament and then assemble them.
"I had to slice up the files and print off like 10 different pieces."
It has been a massive challenge for Eady, who describes herself as being "so bad" with technology.
Even the process of gluing the sections together had been hard work and she has ended up with a box of prints which have not worked.
The idea is to mount the figurines on plinths referencing artist Janine Antoni’s 1993 work Lick and Lather in which she cast a bust of herself in soap and chocolate.
She will accompany the figurines with a video featuring hundreds of the AI-generated images of women, morphing in and out of one another and chanting words generated by Al.
"I got AI to write a poem from my essay critiquing it. So I got AI to kind of critique itself, which I think is kind of funny."
The poem it created is interesting, she says, especially the stanza "Make me beautiful, I plea, but what you show is not of me, a twisted form, a naked shade, by unseen hands, my image made".
She first asked it to write a song but it made it sound like a Disney song.
"It’s so terrible I won’t be using it."
The whole experience made Eady, whose father is DSA lecturer and artist Scott Eady, quite uneasy over the use of AI when it comes to the representation of women.
"I feel like it’s kind of just taking us a step back and just over-sexualising again, and I’m kind of disgusted with the whole commodification of women’s bodies, and so I’m looking at that as well.
"AI is fundamentally a product of the data it processes, and it’s simply a machine that doesn’t possess the ability to discern ethical or moral implications — well, not yet, at least."
Bringing outdoor garden inside
Taking a chance on what can grow out of depleted soil inside during the Dunedin School of Art’s "Site" exhibition is a risky endeavour.
But Lucy Hill is not concerned.
"It will be good to get in and make something."
As part of her honour’s project, Hill is planning on moving a small garden from outside the sculpture department — earth, weeds and plants — and deconstructing it.
"I was quite interested in like empty lots at first and plants that grew in them."
From there, she has started looking at gardens and cultivated spaces and how humans control these spaces and what plants grow where.
"This idea of human control has been quite interesting. Like this designation of nature and where plants can go in this human-centric world."
The small garden she had selected had been left to become overgrown before it was planted with natives and landscaped with rocks from Cromwell.
"Its a garden bed, so it doesn’t actually touch the earth below, it’s contained so the soil is brought in, all the elements are brought in."
Once deconstructed in the exhibition space, Hill will water the soil with the rainwater she has collected on site to see what will grow.
"It's also quite interesting because it's not a very long amount of time."
She has been trialling collecting weeds, planting them and seeing what grows from them. She also let a bed of weeds grow and then weeded them out as a performance art piece.
Hill, who was part of a group exhibition at Blue Oyster Art Project Space last year, has also been making videos using footage from attaching her cellphone to her leg and filming the weeds and plants that grow out of the cracks of footpaths as she walks along.
She has enjoyed being back at art school after taking time out following her graduation from her art degree.
Artist finds path in painting’s dualities
All it took for Venetia Wilson to find her niche was one class where she got to use paints.
"I was like ‘oh my gosh this is my favourite hour of the whole year’."
She was in her hometown of Auckland doing a graphic design degree when she attended the life-drawing class and it made her realise she was not on the right track.
Wanting to return to Otago after loving a year in Wanaka at Mount Aspiring College where she did her year 13, she chose Dunedin to study art.
"I was missing the mountains and the beach, so I decided to make the move and switch to visual arts as well."
The rediscovery of her love of painting did not come as too much of a surprise as she has always been creative loving painting, drawing, fashion and photography.
"Both my parents worked for themselves in kind of the creative industry, so that’s always been around me."
At the Dunedin School of Art she has fully immersed herself in painting, especially large acrylic works on canvas.
"They are very large and colourful, and this year I’ve been looking at the idea of duality, specifically between the mental and the physical, so the brain and the body, because I paint memories and experiences, which is very mental, in the past, not right now, and then my painting is very in the moment, gestural, there’s a real materiality and physicality to the paint, the physical paint and the mark-making is very in the moment."
Wilson, whose mother studied fine arts and whose grandmother has a studio at their family home, walks the line between abstract and figurative painting.
"I am often painting people but you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell, so I kind of infuse my paintings with the people in my memories, and whatever kind of moment in time that I’m painting, and then hopefully the audience can see a little bit of that or see themselves in the work."
Acrylics are her choice of medium as they allow her to work fast and layer up the paint. It also means she can afford to create large canvases.
"You can also mix with water and do washes and use ink, which I really like doing, and there’s a focus on transparency and opaque in my work, and push and pull and how those different layers create foreground and background, and kind of create a landscape even though it’s an abstract work."
While she also likes to work small scale with one of her favourite sizes, A5, she admits working at large scale is quite exciting.
"It’s also been quite a challenge scaling up the works, and that’s been a big part of my process because obviously doing a small mark down here with your hand, if you’re doing it on a 2m canvas, it’s a whole body thing, so it’s also been a focus of mine, turning the hand into the body and moving the whole body to make the painting."
She has loved her time in Dunedin, taking the opportunity for the full student experience by living in Castle St for one year, but is now planning on returning to Auckland and trying out for a curatorial internship.
"I would quite like to go into events, event design, set design, or I’ve also applied to work on yachts in the Caribbean next winter, so there’s that as well. But I don’t have anything set up.
"I’ll definitely be moving home, keeping on painting."
