Sergio Albiac - Posts

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Abstract Utopias

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

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We live in imploding worlds. Shrinking worlds of privacy, perceived security, long term employment and ecological equilibrium. Negating the impossible could the best strategy to navigate these challenging times.

Utopias were contemporary to the birth of artistic abstraction. Kandinsky, Mondrian, Malevich and others, shared with utopians ideals of departure from the status quo. Today, abstract art is more relevant than ever.

With its absence of references to the tangible visual world, abstract art has no story telling anchors, no official narratives. Although challenging and upsetting for some, the contemplation of abstract art offers a great opportunity.

Yes, abstract art does not propose a specific visual problem to solve. In front of an abstract work of art you have to exert the power of choice and imagination to make sense of what you see. You have to select your own problem. Abstract art is not a destination. It's a warm-up for an introspective journey. It is a call to critical thinking through visual stimulation.

Abstract Utopias is a giclée print series conceived as an exploration of algorithmic introspections. Translating oil painting techniques into generative code, Abstract Utopias combines welcoming color harmonies and organic forms with unnatural joints and inconsistent illumination. A visual paradox to invalidate any understanding effort and an invitation to ask new and better questions about yourself and your world.

Moonracer series

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0100

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The Wappo native americans lived in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys (California, USA). They competed in a series of distance races called “Moon Races” which took place under the moonlight. These moonracers, as many native american tribes, believed that everything in the universe is alive. All animated beings, natural phenomena and objects possess souls and spirit. All elements present in nature are infused with a form of energy or meaning that unifies them in a cosmic brotherhood while preserving their individuality and character.

When Juan Mercado, founder and co-owner of Realm Cellars in the Napa Valley, asked me to create an artwork for their new Moonracer Estate Cabernet Sauvignon label, I started thinking if Animism could be represented as a work of art, distilling the forces of nature and living beings in a gestural generative brushstroke composition. I wanted to represent the individuality of the souls, so I would not create a single artwork but an individual work for each individual bottle in a given vintage. And each individual artwork would be driven, in part, by natural forces in the form of unique combinations of data captured in the vinyeard field during the growing season. Everyone was excited by this concept but we needed data from the 2014 season. Fortunately, Realm had available many data dimensions related to grape health, growth and natural drivers captured through a complete sensor system deployed on their estate vinyeard. So, after making sure that we could produce a single label / artwork per bottle (apparently, this has not been attempted before in a wine label), I developed artistic concepts & generative codes so the Moonracer series of generative artworks from natural data was born.

In this video, Juan Mercado tells the story behind this artwork series and the Moonracer estate wine. The first Moonracer vintage (2014) will be released on Spring 2017.

I am.

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0200

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In a post-selfie time where machine learning algorithms convincingly turn photos into imitated masterpieces, how can computer code be used as a medium to tell stories about human identity? My latest code-based works use the Internet as an art supply store: Big and small data, cloud computing and real-time machine learning services are combined with my custom generative computer code. This process infuses with personal meaning any resulting artwork with a sort of Personal Essentialism. I borrow meaning directly from portrait sitters' personal data and I transform it into identity metaphors where meaning can be retrieved.

During april 8th and 9th, 2016 at Internet Age Media weekend I invited attendants to describe themselves, speaking to my cloud-based artistic installation. Using the Web Speech API, their voices where transcripted into text. Then, the text was transformed or complemented with literary or philosophical passages I freely associate it with through custom semantic analysis. All in near real time. The generative collage portraits contained a personal narrative texture broken by unexpected associated inspirations and random typographic accidents. See the video below and a selection of the 160 portraits created during a weekend.

This approach to turn data into meaning in the context of contemporary portraiture will be expanded in future works. So I have created an experimental platform called beyApp ("beyond appearance") that will become a sort of virtual portrait studio. Hopefully, this Art-as-a-Service project will bring me closer to my vision of generative portraits as portals to human identity.

As a first experiment on this new platform, a modified version of the I am portraits is now free and open to everyone for a limited time. Besides custom sentiment analysis and generative techniques, there is a first intent to use machine learning networks trained by me, so the resulting artwork does not imitate other artists styles, as we frequently see these days, but my very own style. Very early code and new techniques, so things can sometimes go wrong from an aesthetic point of view.

Do you want to create your portrait from your own words? Ask for an invite at www.beyapp.com. As I did with my Stardust project, it is free and open to everyone, although the invitations are limited. UPDATE 28/1/2017: The open art experiment has ended. If you want to receive invitations to the next open art experiments, please subscribe to my updates.

Painted code

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0100

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During 2015 I was commissioned by the Ritz-Carlton Millenia Singapore hotel to create a series of big paintings for their completely renovated Summer Pavilion. The artworks should be executed in the style of my Emotional Fields series of acrylic paintings.

I loaded my coding palette with intense reds, oranges, violets and yellows and created several generative sketches to form a warm set of summertime visual abstractions. Once satisfied with the resulting vibrance, I added a new layer of organic randomness with manual application of acrylic paint on belgian linen.

Although visually reminiscent of color field paintings, this is, in fact, painted computer code.

Stardust. An experiment in generative portraiture

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0100

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Life is finite. Creativity isn't. An artist has the potential to create infinite artworks but only some of them will see the light due to the constraint of time. 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.

Some models of human creativity describe it as a process that produces novel combinations of pre-existing ideas or objects. We curate these combinations in our human minds. We abort potential creations. This experiment in generative portraiture will be the opposite: it will give birth to as many novel combinations as possible, taking the risks of non curated creation and experimenting with the use of generative strategies to create assisted works of art. It should also raise issues about the origin of value in art: meaning to the viewer eyes, originality, authorship, scarcity, idea generation and execution dexterity.

As a theme for this series of portraits, I've choosen the concept of nucleosynthesis or the process of creation of new atomic nuclei from pre-existing matter that takes place at cosmic scale. We humans, are believed to be novel combinations of cosmic stardust. It could be argued that the whole universe is the biggest running generative art installation today. Personal beliefs will determine who we think the artist is.

This experiment, with the participation of an Internet audience, intended to produce as many artworks as possible (during a limited time, beginning 18th of June 2013 and ending the 7th of March 2014). An automated process created human portraits as generative collages, using as sources some images from the hubble space telescope. Generated portraits are being exhibited at the flickr Stardust Portrait exhibition. Participation was free and everyone was invited.

The project created more than 15.000 portraits and 14.317 of them can be seen at the flickr Stardust Portrait exhibition

A selection of media reactions about the project:

The Creators Project: Computer-Generated Portraits Created From Images Of The Universe
Wired: An Algorithm Uses Galaxies to Draw Your Portrait
Smithsonian: Cosmic Portraits Created From Hubble Space Telescope Images
Huffington Post: Sergio Albiac Uses Hubble Telescope Images To Create Hypnotic Generative Portraits
Fox News: Made of stars: Artist uses celestial photos for portraits
Designboom: Sergio Albiac: hubble telescope stardust portraits
The Washington Post: Cosmic portraits and out-of-this-world sweet treats
FastCo Create: See Your Portrait, Painted With The Cosmos
Booooooom: “Stardust” Generative Portraits by Sergio Albiac
Designcollector: Art of Sergio Albiac
Gizmodo: These Portraits Are Made from Hubble Images (And Yours Can Be, Too)
RT: Caras humanas bajo polvo cósmico: artista visual causa furor en Internet

The generative identity of Walter Vanhaerents

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0200

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I've been designing and developing a new creative framework for about a year now: a flexible process of generative artistic creation that transforms meaning into artworks. My last project, Stardust, was a first experiment around this concept.

While working on it, some months ago, Happiness Brussels, an innovative belgium communication agency, contacted me with the challenge of transforming a Lexus IS 300h hybrid car into a work of art. But not the usual transformation. They wanted the car to actually generate artworks. It was perfect: a dream opportunity to put my new creative framework at work. So I took the challenge.

Each time the driver would start a trip, a new artwork would be created, using real time data from the car sensors. The final artwork would be an interpretation of my very own hand brushwork with one of my generative aesthetics, affected by the driving style and duration of the travel.

It was clear to me that the generated artworks should be portraits of the driver. And the unifying theme would be the construction of the human indentity (one of my favourite artistic research subjects):

Who are you? Who will you become? Who could you be? Who do you want to be? Your identity is the hybrid product of genetics and experience (your relationship with the environment). Most of your external appearance is determined by your genes and your face crystallizes this aspect of your identity. Your portrait is how others identify you. But for you to become you, you must live. You must experience life. Your genes were not your choice. Not yet. But you completely decide how you live... well not really. Under this illusion of control lies the real hybrid nature of human experience. You are shaped by choices and chance. By will and pure randomness.

So this art project would be all about human identity. An interactive art installation that records a part of the driver's experience and uses it to create a collection of artworks. It starts from genetics (in the form of the driver's photo portrait) and it shapes this appearance with choice and chance. The medium is a mixture of software, computers and automotive engineering.

Generative art outsources artistic / aesthetic decisions to processes out of the artist's control, surrendering part of the decisions in the creation process. In this case, the generative artworks will be affected by driver decisions and random traffic events. Once the artist’s intellectual and execution process is modeled into computer code (software that I've developed), an opportunity arises: a bigger part of the artistic potential can now be realized using generative assistants. Just as all potential artworks are dormant within an artist. All the potential “you’s” are dormant within you. This is a relevant medium and process to realize a metaphor of identity: a collection of artistic portraits made by the hybrid influence of genetics, will power and chance. A series of possible "you's".

The driver of this unique art experiment should be someone special. So the project team contacted Mr. Walter Vanhaerents, a belgian entrepreneur and passionate art collector. He is behind one of the most important private contemporary art collections: The Vanhaerents Art Collection. Mr. Vanhaerents was intrigued by our artistic proposition and he kindly (and selflessly) decided to participate. He will become a fundamental part of the creation process.

This is how "The Generative Identity of Walter Vanhaerents" art installation and art project were born. If you want to know more about it and see the ongoing collection of artworks created by the interaction of Mr. Vanhaerents with the art installation, please head to the official public website Art is Motion

I want to thank Walter Vanhaerents for accepting the challenge of this unusual art project. And also, thanks to all the wonderful people at Lexus Belgium, Hapinness Brussels and many others. Especially the team: Sophie, Thierry, Ross and Arnaud, who worked so hard to make this idea come true. Thank you guys!

The illusion of Reality

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

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Ongoing generative and procedural series of portraits. Filtered reality.

Always and forever

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0100

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Dissolved memories of the future. Ongoing generative portrait series.

Divided experiences exhibition

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

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Some of the artworks that were at display in my solo exhibition “Divided Experiences”, showing giclée prints and interactive installation at “El Bigote del Sr. Smith“ gallery, Barcelona.

From October 6th to November 10th (2012)

Great artists self-portraits

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0200

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Generative collage portraits of great poets and classical composers, using bits and pieces of their manuscripts, music sheets and calligraphic signatures