Salon 92 // Breaking AI

And hash. Hey, everyone my name is Colin Goldberg, and we're here at Techspressionist. Salon number 92, which is called breaking AI. Today's Thursday, March 6, th 2025, and I'm zooming in from North Bennington, Vermont. We have a very wide range of people here in the salon. And we have 4 artists presenting. So it's gonna be basically on AI and how the presenting artists incorporate AI into their studio practices. So I'm gonna give a quick introduction for those who might be here for your very 1st salon, or for people who are watching this as a recording on YouTube, just a little background. On what a Techspressionist in a salon is.

Colin Goldberg

So the salons are a time and place in cyberspace where artists can gather once a month to share their work and to discuss matters relating to art, philosophy, and technology. The meetups were conceived of as a modern counterpart to the surrealist salons of the 1920s in which artists could meet informally to socialize and to discuss ideas. Techspressionism is a 100% volunteer based international artist community. We're not an organization in any kind of real sense of the word. I like to think of Techspressionism as an Ism which is very vague, but kind of the antithesis of an organization.

Colin Goldberg

The 1st salon was held on September 1st 2020, and included myself, Patrick Lichty, Steve Miller, and Oz Van Rosen, all of whom are artists in the community as well as art historian, Helen Harrison. So Helen in 1990, after serving as curator of the Parish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, Director of the Public Art Preservation Committee in Manhattan, and Curator of Guildhall Museum, in East Hampton, became director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, which is a national historic Landmark Museum, and the former home of abstract expressionists, Jackson, Pollock and Lee Krasner.

Colin Goldberg

And she served as director of the Pk House until from 1990 until retiring this past year, and she continues to serve in an advisory role to the community and is a great asset to the project. She's been a real guiding light. So during the 1st salon session. The working definition of Techspressionism was decided upon by their participants as an artistic approach in which technology is utilized as a means to express emotional experience. Artist, Davonte Bradley, Aka. Davo proposed the idea of recording the salons and publishing them on a YouTube channel which was implemented starting with the Salon Number 8, and that was recorded on January 5, th 2021. So since then, you know, we're now at Salon Number 92, which is pretty remarkable.

Colin Goldberg

So the salons are moderated by a rotating panel of artist volunteers, and after the recording ends again, you guys are welcome to hang out for this after party, Aka, the Advisory Board. It's kind of tongue in cheek, in which the topic for the next salon is often decided upon, and other community related ideas are discussed. So that's my spiel about. What is a salon? Now, we're gonna move on into the good stuff which is the presentations, by the artists.

Colin Goldberg

And we have 4 artists presenting here today on this topic of AI. And I also want to note that the salon itself was curated by Renatifska, who is unable to be with us today. She was dealing with some medical issues, so she contacted me this morning, asked me if I would moderate. So she is responsible for selecting the artists and working with them on preparing, you know, their materials, and so forth. So kudos to Renata for coming up with this idea and putting it together. So the artists presenting today are Ariel Baron-Robbins Robbins System.

Colin Goldberg

Michael Pierre Price and Randi Matushevitz, and each artist is gonna be given 10 min to present their work, and we're gonna hold the questions until the end. After all, artists have presented. So before each artist presents. I'm just going to read a little bit of a background. So you guys will know something about each one of them. And our 1st presenter is Ariel Baron-Robbins Robbins, who is an interdisciplinary artist and academic specializing in digital media and drawing. She teaches animation at Florida International University as a visiting, associate, teaching professor and holding an Mfa. In interdisciplinary studies from the University of South Florida. She has over a decade of experience, teaching, drawing, and digital art in South Florida and has exhibited her artwork widely.

Colin Goldberg

She's integrating generative, artificial intelligence into her intermediate animation, advanced animation and story development courses. She requires students to use Gan programs in the classroom for creating animations and to assist with conceptualization and research. She recorded live on X and for a podcast during her intermediate slash advanced class in 2024, with Artist and Podcaster, Whizpill, titled Animation and AI Skills and Tools of the future taught in universities. She has recently participated in a panel at Fiu's Radcliffe incubator space titled before and after, where she discussed and demonstrated the impact of using generative AI.

Colin Goldberg

Additionally, she was featured in a discussion with Stephanie Trip from the University of Tampa. Titled Discussion with Curator AI Nfts art in the Metaverse held at tempest projects in Tampa, Florida so without further ado, I will hand the mic over to Ariel.

Hello! You guys, can you guys hear me? Oh, no, no. Okay. Sorry. I'm in front of a college classroom right now. Just so you know. And so thank you so much. For that, that was long. 10 min. Is not that short? So I'm going to start sharing my desktop. Okay? So yes, all of that was true. I've had a very interdisciplinary focus. When it comes to my artwork you can find me. This is my website right here. Where you can draw, I would say the Major. One of the major things between all that connects all of my artwork together is an interest in process and the process of making work.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

Right now, I'm actually doing a project, a couple different projects. One's with AI. So I'm going to show mostly that. But I also want to talk about loop Art critique, which is a I run this place. I created it. And it's a place for artists to come together, and in small groups have a 6 week long series of art critiques so kind of like a residency. But it's really just sort of a gathering of a small group of people. And then there's an Exhibition, and Renata has been a part of it, and Joey and a couple other people here. And actually, Patrick is. Leahy is in it right now. So I didn't even know that about him being part of Techspressionist. So I guess we have a whole thing, anyway. So I just wanted to show. And this is actually all about process. Loop is an artwork. It's not a for profit. It's not a nonprofit, it's an artwork. It exists on its own and literally contains people talking about their processes, and also people working on works in process and showing them to each other and getting feedback. So it's a feedback space to talk about what I'm doing with AI right now, I'm going to switch over to where I have my.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

Where is it? There it is. Okay. So I have been, I love technology, obviously. And I have been interested in working with AI for a long time. Let me see if this is actually going to work. Yeah. But I 1st came from like a video art perspective. So I was a drawer and painter. And then I became like a video artist who really liked like 1970s video art and did a lot of work that looks sort of like that. And then I decided to. I decided a couple years ago that I wanted to try to recreate these old video pieces.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

Using AI to see what would happen, and also because I knew the AI would kind of get it wrong. And I was interested in how it would process guys, how it would process the process that I was doing. It's hard to talk about. So this is a piece I made for my graduate Exhibition for my Mfa. Which I got from University of South Florida, and it's a picture of me attempting to draw my own shadow. But I'm you can't see any lines. I'm using white chalk. And can you guys please? I'm sorry I'm live.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

Please keep it down. Sorry. And I and I'm trying to draw my own shadow. It's a Sisyphean task. I can't do it. Of course I'm wrestling with it. It's impossible to do so. Then I recreated that piece in 2,015. This will make sense, I promise and my plan is, and still is, to recreate these pieces. I have like, I don't know about 3 pieces, 4 pieces that I'm going to recreate until I just kind of physically can't recreate it anymore. Right? So I plan to do one, you know, in 10 years, maybe another 5 years. I'm not going to stick to a strict schedule because I can never do that, but it's kind of a it's going to be a lifelong work until I have these recreations all up together.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

So I have this one. And so this one I was like, well, I'm going to recreate it using AI, you know. And so this is the 1st one I did. And this is when mainly it was the time period was mainly text to video, right? So it didn't really have a lot of image to video ais. So this is all text to video. And I wanted to also use as many different AI models as possible. And to leave in the watermarks because the to me, the watermarks, and all of that was going to be like A way of documenting this time and this time that we have right now, right in the actual technology, and how good it is, or how bad it is, and all of those things.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

So here is this one.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

And this one is deliberately bad quality, by the way, so some of the quality is all over the place with the different models. The different programs.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

And, by the way a lot of these. You know. I also wanted to see how they would treat like the female body, you know, because a lot of there's a lot of bias that comes into AI, you know, and how they would. How they would try to interpret it. Some do amazingly interesting, weird things. Of course, all of them are, you know, conventionally attractive and white, even though I didn't specify a race in the prompt. Because of the bias. So I did that project, and I did the same thing to another one. So this is an old I think this is from 2,000, and I have probably 1011, or something like that around that time period. I have it. And it's me doing an invisible drawing on the High Line. Actually, it's when the High Line 1st began in New York City. So it's right that time period, and I'm drawing what I'm seeing, actually what I'm seeing. But of course you can't see it.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

And so I did this piece and the slow quality, because I didn't really have the finances to get a better. A better one. And so then I recreated it in 2,023, and.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

Got to the pretty much the exact same spot, as far as I could tell. And just did the exact same kind of Silly thing. And to me it's like, What is it? Because I'm obsessed with drawing. It's kind of like what is a drawing, you know. To me a drawing is, in a way always incomplete. And I just I don't know. I have a very like romantic possibly, or even like religious thing about drawing in particular, and about the process of doing it, and drawing with both my hands, because also I like the figure, and I like, you know, the way that it looks as well, of course, on the frame itself. I'm definitely a formalist.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

So I have this one. And then I had this. Now, this is when we got more video to video AI and image to image AI, so I could do it a little bit more close to the actual, you know. Visuals. So this is great. This was in a show in 2024. So now I'm recreating them, and it's changed significantly since the last time I tried to do the recreation, which I think was in 2022. Still some messed up, you know stuff. And you know I'm not using necessarily top of the line. But you know I've gradually actually bought, you know, some credits, not use the free versions.

You have about 2 min left. Ariel.

Okay, yeah, and so I'm putting them together. So also, I have some rules when it comes to these projects and the rules, because I'm very into flux fluxes and things like that, which is my rule is that you know I do. The generation I try to stick to the 1st run through, you know, and not repeat and repeat and repeat. Because I just want to get the raw output of what it's doing. So in a way, I'm like kind of like co-constructing it. And with the AI. And I'm allowing the AI to have a lot of autonomy in this process. You know, I created the whole video. So I've had a lot to do with it. The AI also has a lot to do with it at the end, because I'm only running it once. I'm not necessarily making the decision by running it over and over and over again to control it that way if that makes sense.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

So this is my most recent one. And it's from an old video Of me rolling down hills. So I did this whole thing where I was like dressed in white, rolling down hills. Many different types of hills. And this is from probably like 2,013 or so. So. Here's the updated version, one's missing. There's 1 that I just and then I'm going to do the last one. So this is my last one, and I just got done with this like yesterday. So world premiere.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

And so this is the most recent. And of course the quality is, I think, actually better. Is really sticking closely to like actually the background and everything. This one was mostly image with a prompt. The prompt didn't say anything about the race or the color of the hair of the woman. It just said, a woman. Just so. I'm still sort of testing exactly what it's going to do. This one was very interesting because it turned the me. Wearing white to me, bearing a wedding dress or a hoofy dress like that.

Ariel Baron-Robbins

Yeah, so, okay. But I time is running out like I said, I'm in front of a college classroom, unfortunately. So if you have any questions, I put my email in the chat, and thank you so much to the Techspressionists for inviting me. Thank you.

Awesome. Okay, thanks so much. Ariel. Really interesting presentation. And I can definitely relate with that 1st run thing. That's kind of the philosophy with these salons is they're almost never edited. They go straight to YouTube from the Zoom recording. So there's all sorts of interesting Happenings and mishaps, which is all part of the art. You know definitely Warhol's tradition as well in his filmmaking. Just let it run so the next presenter that we have is system. Who is zooming in from France? I believe I know you're from France originally. So if you wanna just say Hello! And then I actually have A recording of his that Renata sent me this morning. That's about 7 and a half minutes. So that's gonna play. It's in its entirety. And but 1st I just wanted to introduce system. And oh, actually, you know what I have a little brief intro almost forgot. So system offers explosive mashups of Internet aesthetics where information images and comments provide a frame of today's digital pop culture, the artist remixes web images and uses an audio visual spectacle to display the patterns dominating the Internet, its icons, its manifestations, and its digital prosperity. We are the lucky spectators of what he presents to us.

Colin Goldberg

Sistem has been a French contemporary digital artist since 1999, founder of French trash touch 1995, founder of system 1999, founder of spam. That's with 2 M's. 2011. He's a pioneer of net art, digital art, and glitch. So with that, I give you system.

Hello, everybody! Thank you for this invitation.

Alright. Well, I didn't understand that, but apparently we have captioning enabled. So when it comes time to do the QA. There is an option down at the bottom show captions which, as long as you select English it should translate in real time. What system is saying in French, I should have probably prefaced that with that. But at any rate, that is something that we have in effect on all the salons moving forward. Big ups to Cynthia Beth Rubin. For you know, researching this technology and helping to implement it. Super useful, especially for the Co. Working sessions which happen every week, and artists from all around the world get together and just spend time synchronous time working together and doing crits and all sorts of other fun stuff. So there's info on that on the text, impressionism, homepage so without further ado, I am going to share my screen and play systems, video, which is about 7 and a half minutes. So here we go. Can you guys see my screen? Okay, okay.

Yeah, I fight through circuit on the digital throne. You know. I recycle my waste. Yeah, I'm in the business. I make dirt clean. Bro. Call me finesse. I smoke motherboards, put the chip in my life. I am Michael Borras, also known as Systaime. Since the mid 1990s I have explored the digital realm, relentlessly questioning our hyper-connected society and its absurdities. My artistic journey, positioned at the intersection of art and technology, has led me to experiment with diverse media and techniques as technology evolves.

Systaime

Early in my career I played a key role in the French trash touch, a movement marked by a raw, provocative aesthetic that sought to deconstruct established codes. This period embraced a Diy approach, where mashups, collages, and sampling repurposed visual and sound fragments from the web and obsolete objects challenging our relationship with media and technology. With the rise of generative AI, a new era of digital art emerged. AI, now accessible without extensive technical know-how offers unprecedented creative possibilities. For me. AI is an additional tool in my palette. It automates, tasks, generates endless variations, and helps explore new forms. Yet artistic intent remains paramount.

Systaime

I set the rules, guide the process and decide the outcome. My recent projects illustrate this approach in albums like crypto, kikta and la Mavisai. I used algorithms to create rhythmic patterns and sound textures, later reworked into unique compositions in the music video swimming pool, free party AI produced extravagant visual effects that enhanced its offbeat. Aesthetic. Similarly, electro, Mukbang analyzes online food consumption videos critiquing our dependence on technology and consumer culture. Reflection on AI and artistic creation the use of AI in art has sparked debates about authenticity and human intention. I believe art is defined by its ideas, messages, and emotions. AI enriches the creative process. But it is vital for the artist to remain in control, ensuring that technology serves the vision not vice versa. At comparison with collage. Art. AI continues the tradition of collage, a practice dating back to the Avant garde artists have long cut, assembled, and repurposed pre-existing elements to create new meanings, like traditional collages that recontextualize images. Generative AI draws from vast databases to mix and transform fragments into novel creations.

Systaime

While manual collages bear the mark of each crafted gesture. AI often works as a black box, raising questions about originality and the artist's role. Nonetheless, as with any art, form, intention matters most. It is how the tool is used to evoke meaning and emotion that counts. In conclusion, AI presents unprecedented opportunities to redefine artistic creation. As an artist my role is to explore these new frontiers, question their implications and produce works that mirror the transformations of our digital society. AI is a powerful tool, but it is the artist who imbues it with soul, direction, and meaning, enabling us to reinvent 21st century art by merging human ingenuity with machine power.

Systaime

Body of money! Oh, God, peace and S. Always peace and air money, money. Oh, Whoa! Money! Oh, body! Peacefulness! Always business, honey! Oh, we are rich.

The.

I'll show you mystery.

Systaime

I.

Systaime

I don't even.

Alright. Yeah, that was amazing. Renata. Let me know that it would. It would end very abruptly. But really incredible work. Very happy to have you on here. I'm a fan I've been. I've been following your work on social media, and especially the you know. The recent work with Elon Musk and Trump and the world leaders, Zuckerberg, I mean, it's just remarkably well done, I think. And it's very. It's nice to see that there's some people people capable of pulling off a deep fake that are on our side. So. At any rate. So we will, we will move on, but we will open it up to questions. After all, 4 artists are done presenting so next up. We have Michael Pierre Price, who works from his home studio in Phoenix, Arizona, creating his digital art prints that are primarily inspired by the intersection of modern physics, neuroscience and spirituality. He often uses mathematics, specialized software, and AI when he creates his abstract algorithmic and surrealist art. So with that.

Colin Goldberg

I'm gonna hand the mic over to Michael.

Thanks, Colin.

Michael Pierre Price

Let me go ahead here and do screen share.

Michael Pierre Price

Okay, so here's my title. So I think that I love Renata's title of Breaking AI cause. That's my mode in which I work with it. And how I mean that is, AI is not my wedding photographer. It's my autistic Sherpa. And what I mean by that is the normal mode Of using AI is to use text prompts for creating singular images, and realizing that most people are doing this from a standpoint of narrowing down a fine tuned target, so that when they create images they're within a small parameter of sets that is Reflective of this targeted text. Prompt.

Michael Pierre Price

I find that boring I don't like that at all. For me. My mode of working with AI is what I call my explorer mode, and if you use this image here that I created with AI as sort of my analogy. The way I think about working with AI is in this image. Here you see that there's a mountain or a butte in the in the distance. And conceptually what I'm asking the AI as my autistic Sherpa is to help me get to the far side of that mountain. I don't know what's back there. It may be something really, really fantastic. It may be really awful. I don't know, but I'm exploring, and I want to get there in some way. So the way that I use text prompts and images, I'm dealing with conceptual ideas. I'm dealing with paradox and questions that I have, that I'm trying to get answers for, but I don't have a preconceived notion of what that is. So me as the artist working with AI. I consider myself brainstorming where the AI is. My again, my Sherpa, that's helping collaborate with me to get to the things that I'm striving for, and because my normal subject matter that I like to explore it are rather heavy subjects that are often very conceptual and abstract, like modern physics, consciousness, spirituality.

Michael Pierre Price

The art styles that to me are very reflective of that are abstract, algorithmic, and surrealist. And my motivation as an artist is having studied physics Astrophysics and been a practicer of indigenous spirituality. And an amateur neuroscientist in terms of learning things is that the world really is not, as it seems to our normal everyday existence. We're made out of atoms. We only exist here because stars lived and died, and we have the universe literally constituent matter within us.

Michael Pierre Price

And so trying to look at that, and what it means. The way that I work with AI is I try to challenge the concreteness of AI through the richness and the ambiguities that are in language. Now, my collaborator likes to deal with photographic like images. That's the most natural way that most of the AI software has been set up for, and it likes concrete things. It wants to deal with objects and actions and setting. And so it's looking for specific instructions to help it. Understand that when I come in and using language in ways that it might not be ready for I'm challenging it now overall. This process of exploring is one in which I, as an artist, create tons of images, lots, and lots of images. And if you think about it, the way I approach this rather systematically, would be almost like a family tree, a hierarchy of parent images, that creating child images, grandchildren, great grandchildren.

Michael Pierre Price

Or, if you were to look at the evolutionary scale of life here on Earth. You see the branching structure. Now with creating lots of images. It doesn't mean that I use them all. I use a very small percentage of ones that I find interesting to me, and those are the ones here in this chart that I've put us a green square around them. So I upscale them. And I save them to my hard drive. And even those that I save to my computer only a small percentage of those end up being.

Michael Pierre Price

You know, good enough for me to use as finished art pieces or parts of finished art pieces. And that's my methodology. It's sort of, you know, an outgrowth from my scientific background days. So I wanted to share how I created or what was behind creating the 1st 2 images in my presentation today, and the genesis for those images of which I'm going to show several others. Beyond that was this idea of infinity divided by infinity, equals nothing at all. This concept, rather abstract concept was actually spurred from an old Jethro tall song from their out from their album minstrel in the gallery. It was like 0 to the power of 10 equals. Nothing at all.

Michael Pierre Price

And then I will, I prompted. This is the prompt that I put here, and then this next one, the one that followed it. Is actually a grandchild image of the same lineage that 1st image that I just showed you there and then there was an offshoot as I continued to create more images that this particular piece here from that I'm showing you all the same prompts. But the way that I've created the prompt and challenge the AI. I'm getting some really interesting imagery. Next this next image.

Michael Pierre Price

I changed the second part of the prompt from a mathematical surrealist piece to a surrealist landscape, and the idea of landscape. Now, all of a sudden, you can see there's a tree in this image, but you're still seeing some of the other characteristics from the other lineages in this brand new lineage here. And the final one that I wanted to show you from here. Brought in now, this idea of still life to this idea of infinity, divided by infinity, equals 0 or equals nothing at all now and on the side here, I've indicated that in this whole entire set of images that I created with this idea of infinity. I created 532 images. I've saved like 58, and I created 7 lineages in total. I just wanted to let you see, sort of behind the scenes of my methodology of how I work.

One second.

AI. And then the image here, and the other one that were the backdrops for my previous diagrams. I just wanted to share how I created them. Again, looking at the prompt. Here I also had a reference image that I used from one of my other previous works. And then this one. Here's the prompt. And then I use 3 images to blend together. Now in mid journey, which is what I use. This idea of blending images is really a key factor for a lot of the work that I do, because what it allows me and I'm showing you in this image in the next one is that I actually use some of my older fractal images, 3D fractal images that I created with Mandel bulb 3D. So I could take soft. I could take images that were created at a different software, use AI than to create an amalgam of images that are fusions of a different way of which I generated my own art.

Michael Pierre Price

Currently, I'm working on some ideas that are representative of some really key ideas within modern physics, especially subatomic physics. So I'm just sharing a few here. And what's really interesting here is I wanted to share this quote from Niels Bohr, who a hundred years ago was a founding member of quantum mechanics. And what's really important here is to realize the esoteric spiritual quality that a lot of the physicists who came up with and were pioneers of quantum mechanics realized that there is an unreal aspect to the reality of quantum mechanics, and it's really fascinating.

Michael Pierre Price

The next series of images are really foundational for me in the way that I work, because they tackle big questions that I have about what's the nature of reality in the universe? And are there things hidden in the fabric of reality that we, as human beings, are struggling to try to find out? Is everything in the universe true? Can the universe lie to us, we, as human beings, lie to one another? Is there any sense of diversion, or where does the origin of paradox come from? And those are sorts of things that I'm looking at when I work on a lot of my images. And so the next series here are sort of tackling that.

Michael, we're just about at time. Sorry I forgot.

Okay, alright, I'll whiz through here really quickly, then.

Michael Pierre Price

And these images here of the where for me of the universe ever becoming. It's the sense of potential actualized.

Michael Pierre Price

And these are recent images that I actually have up on my website, which were generated by AI. And this final one. Here is an homage to Salvador Dali and Renee Magret. With the burning giraffe smoking the pipe. And so I'll end it there.

Michael Pierre Price

Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Michael. Definitely. Very interesting to see the diversity of how you know you use AI, and then how all of the other artists presenting have used AI so really pretty cool. So the next and final presenter is Randi Matushevitz. Who is an American multidisciplinary artist, based in Los Angeles. Her installations, paintings, mixed media drawings, and videos have been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally. Her artwork is found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California, the Cleveland Clinic, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Art Museum at the Majore Barrack Museum of Art University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and enter Art Foundation in Berlin.

Colin Goldberg

So without further ado, I will pass the mic on to Randy. Okay.

Hey? Hi, everyone. Okay, here we go. Let me share this. And let's optimized for Okay, I don't think it's late. Okay. So I wanted to start by saying, I am interested in contemporary portraiture, and what I have been doing is feeding my paintings into AI. So here's this painting here on the left, and this is an example of the variety of things that I will get here in this to start us off in this. Pdf, I've created. So I'm very interested in the fact that the paintings and the interpretation from different photo and video apps editing apps will create a variety of textures, genders, shapes holding actual marks from the paintings, create crooked teeth like the mistakes. As The 1st presenter was saying so, so this is an overview of the variety of mistakes and broad results I cannot get. So here to start with a painting. And then here's a few different interpretations.

Randi Matushevitz

What's really exciting to me is that I never know if I'm going to get something that's.

Randi Matushevitz

But I never know for what I'm gonna get and how I'm gonna use it. So here I'm combining some old and new techniques to show in a video with sound that I put together. So using the regular painting and introducing the AI imagery that I then animate. So that's some of what you're seeing here. What's really cool about this for me, and I was originally told I was only getting 5 min. So I made a very short presentation. Is that, again, to show how I go from painting to multiple interpretations, this painting, quaffed, turned into not only this older woman, this man through without me commanding it to change gender or race, but through just setting.

Randi Matushevitz

And I can, of course, control the facial expressions. These are the same root paintings, and eventually to this idea of how I can take one painting and give you several settings and images for them and then turn them, animate them and turn them into video.

Randi Matushevitz

So here I've combined live film shots of a road trip with these characters to create this unreal sense of feeling and as if they were real. Another aspect of my practice with this work is using things like art breeder, where I combine 3 and 4 paintings to create an image. And this is working with similar the similar 3 and 4 paintings. And this is another image that I put together. So I think it's very interesting how The AI will allow me to take a simple painting again. This is just to go back and forth this painting, some different setting, right to again creating all other section of her. And these are some video stills. And here is that video.

Randi Matushevitz

And there's no sound on this one. So then, again, using all these different apps to enhance the animation and create these characters. So when I do this like in my photo stream. For example. These characters will. There are tons of them, and I save to like a little bit of what. Michael was revealing. You can get like. There's all these different Options to choose to save them to. I just want you to see how it works, and then you pick the best ones, of course. And so that's pretty much. That's my presentation. I was told. It's gonna be really short. So I just wanted to show a few of what I was doing.

All right. Thanks so much, Randy. Really interesting to see this work, and I think the last work of yours that I really looked at was when I was curating the show in Southampton, and I saw those animations and portraits that you'd created for that so I could definitely see the continuity and the evolution of things. It's really interesting.

What's really interesting about the AI is that I can get anthropomorphic imagery. So some of those are on my website where I can make plant human characters like, you know, the it's unknown what I'll get, and I feel it's a collaboration. I'm not controlling it on any level, and it's that mixture of what I, my painting, and then all the interpretations and the reinterpretations, as Michael was saying, and the 100th version, and then you find the one that, you know did something unusual Unrealism, as he said.

Yeah, I think a lot of. I've heard a lot of artists, you know, describe the process of working with AI as a collaboration which I think you know, is very apropos. So each of the artists has. I have links to their Instagram and website on the salon page which is at Techspressionism.com slash salon. So there's a description Of the various artists in this salon with links to their social media and websites. So if you guys want to check out more of their work and follow them, you can do that. I also as sort of a side note. I didn't anticipate moderating. But I've personally been using AI mid journey in particular to create the Salon Graphics. So this is the current one. And I think it's kind of interesting. I started working with AI, really in the capacity of creating these promotional graphics for the salons which is based on the topic of the salon, so the majority of them from, I would say.

Colin Goldberg

50. These were sort of photo montages. And then it starts going into images that were created with AI after that. So the last, maybe 40 or so salon graphics were created with, you know, in collaboration with mid journey, that is to say there was quite a bit of post processing and retouching and stuff like that after the prompting and I just thought it would be interesting just to show you guys real quick. So this was the original prompt for this image, which was a photorealistic image in the Techspressionist style of a humanoid female robot in a painting video painting a self portrait while looking in a mirror that shows the reflection of a female artist so like Ariel was saying. The bias is immediately, you know, white blonde.

Colin Goldberg

Thin female, and then, you know, I sort of played around with the prompting. Trying different things. You could see. If you guys are familiar at all with midjourney, it generates 4 different options. Then you can pick one and keep iterating and changing stuff. And then at some point, I thought, well, the topic is breaking. AI. So how about we change it up? Artists should be African, American and holding a paintbrush while facing a robot that looks like her. Okay? So there's the, you know, the biased, stereotypical African American female artist that midjourney came up with. And then at 1 point I thought this was very interesting.

Colin Goldberg

It just made this other individual appear, and that was no, that was no prompt that created that. And I was like, that's kind of creepy like. They just made this dude come in there into into the into the scene. And now he's just kind of like lurking in the background like checking out what's going on. And I just thought it was very interesting. How you know that just came about that little piece of sort of Drama in the image just came about on its own, which I thought was a little bit weird. But anyway, I wasn't really intending on showing anything, but I thought that was kind of a little bit of a backstory of the salon image. So I wanted to just open it up to questions for the artists. If you guys want to just use your. If anyone has a question, I would encourage you to use the raise hand tool, which is.

Colin Goldberg

Where is that? It's on the bottom. They keep moving that around or you could just like literally raise your hand. But the raise hand tool kind of works. Okay, I see somebody sherry do you have a question.

Yeah, thank you. I mean, all of you have just amazing images. Really, mind boggling. And I loved all of it. My question is specifically, though to Michael, do you ever actually print any of these out as a photograph, or do you ever paint any of them? Because I could see many of them as actual oil paintings.

So I print the vast majority of the work that I do is for print. And I do have a printer here. And so that is one of the challenges. Is that typically working with AI natively, you get pretty small images overall, usually like HD size like 1920 by 1024 something like that. And if I'm trying to print something like a 20 by 30 inch print, then I have to do the whole upscaling trickery that's involved, which can be rather challenging. So. And then the other thing that I've more recently been doing is looking at creating images for modern digital display. And those are at 4 k, so like 38, 40 by 2160. But most of the work that I'm doing is with the intention for printing. And so there's a whole set set of steps that I have to go through.

Michael Pierre Price

And it's really deceiving. Sometimes something looks good nice on screen, but once you start blowing it up, then you see all kinds of really bad imperfections, and you have to deal with it one way or the other. At least, I want to. Cause I do like them looking like they're painted images in a lot of cases, I tend to stay away from highly photographic looking images. Just because that's just my personal aesthetic.

Thank you.

Alright! Thanks to both of you. So I did discover where this raise hand tool is on the bottom. You should see a little heart, icon that says, react if you tap that there's a button there, raise hand so that's how you do it. So I see, there's hand up, Anton.

Colin Goldberg

You're muted.

Yeah, Hi, Hi, everyone let me put down the hand. Okay? Yeah. 1st of all, it was really amazing. Showcase. I really, I really enjoyed all the works from System Michael and Randy. I was really surprised and like Blown away, really enjoyed it. Everything. So I also work with AI a bit and the main problem for me is curating the ideas and the outputs. So I would like to hear from you artists, how do you, curate? How do you? How did? How do you do? You stay focused on the idea, or you just exploring? And so what's your take on curating the outputs?

Anton Dubrovin (MCHX)

Yeah, thank you.

Okay? So who would like to answer this? 1st out of the artists that are still here, do you, wanna Randy? You want to.

Sure. So how do you, curate? What you show you mean, like what you choose to present to the world?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, like, for example, at 1st you have one idea, then it's developing. But all the all the way through. You need to curate all the outputs right? And then you need to go to like finish line. And so yeah. So I just want to know. How do you do.

So for me, it's a lot of gut instinct. It's what I read. The more I work with the tools, whether, like I said, it's video apps or art breeder or mid journey, or you have choices. It's a very quick I save everything. And then but really, the longer I work with it because I started working with it back in November with AI in this way. Then you get used to certain things it produces, and then you challenge it. So you experiment. And the ones when you look back like when I look back at my photo stream of what I've saved, certain ones just stand out. They're interesting to me. They hold up like in anything with the arc, and that's the one I go with.

Randi Matushevitz

And if it gets too boring sometimes I just start over with the images like, if I'm not getting something I'm interested in to save, I'll do a different combination. I just see what happens some days there's a lot of blah. And other days it's like, Wow, this is really a good role. I have to save everything I'm working on. And look at it again later. And I just like I said. I go with my gut.

Great system. We haven't heard from you yet. Would you like to answer? And 1st of all, would you like to answer in English or in French, because it's up to you if you want to try French, and we could try out the captions. That would be a good test, maybe. Okay, you want to do that. So for all the viewers here, if you click down at the bottom, there's an icon with CC to show captions. You should be able to see the captions, and then I believe you select the language. I had already selected English. But I'm seeing captions now on my screen. Yeah.

Just to interrupt for a second you need to click on translation at the top of the show captions and then pick the language. And for those people who understand French, you have the choice of most people. It's the same language, English, English, but you can make it different languages if you want to use. Read one and speak the other. Okay. And I have a guide that I put way up, and it's also you can. Just. I'll put it in again. If you're having trouble.

Cynthia Beth Rubin

Okay.

Yeah. And on the salon page to Techspressionism.com slash salon. There is a link to the instructions that Cynthia made there as well. So but at any rate this will be our 1st live test. So system. Go ahead.

Yeah. Okay. Etrochement, the glitch art, the. In fact. I don't know if that worked. But I try.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, it worked. That's actually it works. Yeah, thanks. Thank you. Yeah, this is this is definitely, I feel like, you know, a landmark moment in the salons because we have mass. Well, I don't know if I could call it mass, but we have adoption of this translation stuff, which is really cool. So another advantage of being here live in real time is that, I don't think it's gonna work for youtubers out there.

Valorizet UN proven plus savoir Si problematic.

Systaime

Tink.

Systaime

Hi.

Oh, I just I just wanted to add 1 1 more thing to the because of the way that I work. I'm actually trying to elicit surprise From the AI and that obviously gives me a lot of like not really good images. But I start to see little things here and there, and I think that's kind of what Randy was alluding to as well. We you get used to how the tool works. And I can see, start something, start to emerge, and I think that could be kind of interesting. How can I? You know? How can I pull out more from there? And I think that's part for me. That's really why I enjoy working with AI in the way that I'm working with. It is because I'm not trying to dictate a final result.

I'm trying to elicit.

Whatever is in that black box to look at things in really different ways, that I wouldn't necessarily think on my own. But my input is there in the mix. And so that's where that sets a collaborator is really important. And I think you just sort of. I think Randy was right. You just sort of recognize this is this is got. This is a kernel. This is something really, really good here. And that's kind of where you know how I would answer Anton's question from my from my standpoint.

Think, think.

Awesome just out of curiosity. Anton, where are you zooming in from.

Right now, I'm zooming from Moscow. We came back here in December, due to personal reasons. And yeah, before we were in Georgia Tbilisi. So yeah. So now in Moscow. Don't know. Maybe until until summer or longer. Not sure yet.

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I had a feeling. It's another thing about this group that's really you know, really incredible to me is to see people come together from all over the world. And Cynthia Beth Rubin, who helped, you know, implement these captions actually organizing a Techspressionism show in Uzbekistan which is going to be happening in the fall. And a good number of artists in the group. American artists, I believe all of them are American are going to be traveling over there. And that is also totally mind blowing to me the scope of what's been going on with this community. So it's very humbling to be to be part of this project. And I would also encourage the individual artists who presented. If you guys have any questions for any of the other artists who presented. That might also be an interesting direction to take the conversation.

Colin Goldberg

But I do see Lee has his hand up there, so I'll give him first.st Dibs. Randy, did you have another question or.

I just wanted to add to what system was saying, that it's about the ethical use of AI AI, cause it's here. It's here. It's here in our language it's with, you know. It's everywhere, and I do see it as a tool also. So I just wanted to add that in.

Okay, Lee, do you have a question? And if you do let us know who specifically, you might be asking it to, or if it's for all of the artists.

It's really for everyone. Listening to all the artists and to you, Colin.

As someone who doesn't use. I, AI. I was fascinated that your comments took me back to about 1959 with a movie called Forbidden Planet, and which these space travelers are using a computer. And they discover that even though they aren't thinking of monsters, the computer finds the monsters in their it. And brings it forward like the strange man that appeared in your designs. Column.

So is there a specific question that you have for the artist.

Yeah. That's a suggestion more than a question that you're just using a language to give instructions to AI, and it analyzes how you present that language. And it can decipher what you might really be seeking.

Well, you know, I just wanna answer really quickly, just from my own standpoint, that The second part of the collaboration really is that when the artist receives the result. It then is curated by the artist, you know. So there's the creation of the prompt. The you know the machine gives back it's output. And then it's up to the artist to decide. Well, yeah, I want to show this one to the world, or I'm gonna choose this out of the 4, you know. So I actually had a recent conversation where I was using AI tools in a commercial capacity.

Colin Goldberg

And it got to the point that you know part of the audience. Actually, there was an uprising about it, they said, start a change.org petition. We don't want, you know AI to be used in presenting our whatever it is. I don't need to get into it. But and I thought it was really interesting, and this conversation plays into it, hearing from artists how you know it's a tool. And more specifically, it's a way that people are looking inward and finding things out that you know. Maybe aesthetically and ideologically, they wouldn't have thought of just from scratch. So at any rate, you guys want to respond to that.

Hmm. In fact, c'est artiste de saint on Paris.

Systaime

To school a major. We found it je passis et re.

I mean, Colin, I think it's a real interactive process. Yes, there's the receiving of, you know the images. But what's also interesting is what's presented. I can interpret those images in a very different way than somebody else might interpret those images. And it's my interpretation. Then that says, Okay, I want to run with this one or these, because I'm feeling, or I'm sensing this and that goes from there. So it's really that human AI interaction that's at play. It's like.

Michael Pierre Price

You know, somebody hears a piece of music, and for some person they hear noise, and somebody else gets inspired. And I think, as artists. And for me as somebody who really thrives on experimentation and exploration. I'm trying my best to elicit something outside of my expectations. And that really inspires me. And that's why. For me, AI is just this continuous source of new inspiration. And that's, you know, that's where I'm coming from on. All of this.

L'artiste.

Yes.

So somehow, though in Colin's experiment, this A strange character, this dark colored man just pops up. How do you explain that.

Language. Language doesn't have the same precision as mathematics, and when large language models are assigning concepts to images. And all these other things, you can get outliers, and if all of a sudden an outlier appears, you can run with that, and that then becomes infused, and it becomes a character in the play. And so that's where a lot of people want to narrow down. So you don't get as many outliers. And you know that's where a lot of people, you know, like really promote their prompt engineering. And you know, how, how do you? How do you get to something where you're within a very small contained universe of possibilities.

Michael Pierre Price

And like I said to me, that's antithetical to the way I work as an artist, I can't work that way. I find that completely boring. But it's useful if you're trying to create, you know advertising, or if you or if you're trying to create something that you know you're going for a very end. Result. Me, I'm you know. I'm going.

Yeah, it's.

I'm going down into the cave, and I don't know if there's gonna be a monster down there, or if I'm gonna run into, you know, water, you know, up to my neck, and I'm gonna drown, or something. I you know, I don't know. And to me that's exciting as an artist.

Romante.

All right.

I think also, you know, Michael, like the distinction is whether or not AI is being used for art or for illustration. Sure, you know, I find when I'm using it in a commercial capacity, or even to some degree with the Salon Graphics. It's really sort of more of an illustration than art like, I don't really incorporate it into my own art at this point, you know, because it's more like, you know, sort of experimentation. But looking at it from Okay, I have an end result in mind, whereas I see the way you and possibly some of the other artists who presented using it in a much more experimental way, which I think is really, you know, really interesting.

De l'erte travaliers et nouves alerts critiques.

Yeah, I think that's really something that I found very interesting about your work when I 1st started looking at a lot of the more recent sort of politically oriented stuff. Actually, I was sort of curious, you know. Would you? Or you don't really have to answer this. But would you ever consider, or have you? You don't really have to answer this. But ever think about, you know, or consider releasing work anonymously as sort of like an activist. You know a way of using the work in such a way that I mean, it's provocative as it is when you're signing your name to it, but I feel like as consumers of media. We're also prone to be victim of.

Colin Goldberg

You know the use of deep fakes and other things like that. So you know, I think about hacker culture and all that other kind of stuff. And you know your work definitely makes me me think about all that kind of you know. Those sort of tactics, I guess.

Colin Goldberg

Is that yeah, go ahead.

Colin Goldberg

Well, you know, is your is, would you ever think of using AI to create work anonymously.

Anonymous anonymme special de compound.

Yeah, I mean, it's just, I guess when I saw your work, you know, it almost made me feel like if someone was seeing it, and they didn't know it was art they might actually think, you know. Oh, my God! What is what is he doing there? What is Mark Zuckerberg doing there, or what is trump actually doing there. You know, it's not to me convincing that it's really, you know, it functions to me as media activism to some degree, and just my perception of it.

Yeah, yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's my intelligent artificial.

Systaime

Yeah.

And there are lots of lessons like this in art history. Domier comes to mind immediately an artist who had to make a decision. How far he was going to Stretch his political points of view within his artwork within his prints and put them out with his name on. In his case he didn't really have to put his name on it. Everybody would recognize that it was his work. But it's a an interesting point to be at.

Alright. Do we have any other questions from the audience, or Cynthia?

1st of all, let me say it's been a wonderful salon. The concept of breaking AI has come through with each of the presenters, and the breaking suggested to me experimentation, trying to make it the artist's own work rather than what the AI might necessarily produce. And I'm hearing that from the artists that are presenting. But I do have a question for sustain. In your presentation you mentioned that AI involves collage.

And I think that concept is intriguing. Can you tell me more about how you have used collage in the works that we saw today. Collages.

Systaime

Proge du collage.

In a strange way that might explain the make the shadow man that showed up in Collins illustration.

Yeah, but Colin didn't put the man there. If I understand.

We didn't.

The stain.

He didn't. Consciously. He didn't consciously put the man there. But maybe AI is to the point where it can read between the lines, so to speak, of what Colin is really thinking about.

True, however, I think, sustain mentioned that he cuts out if I and he can correct me, he cuts out elements or shapes that he likes and then marries them to another landscape, if you will, or view, or with other characters. And so that collage technique is, I think, very interesting to me, and very powerful.

Detective@yourfirstst

Deanne, do you have a question.

Yeah, I do about the just a comment as well about the man my husband and I were talking about this recently, and about the hallucinations that come from AI. And so like AI, when you're using at a research, will invent things based on what it thinks is the most reasonable Outcome of all the things that's pulled from the Internet. Whether it's real or not, it thinks that. So I think maybe that man that appeared in Collins image was perhaps one of those AI hallucinations.

Deann Stein Hasinoff

And now I'm going to practice a little bit of my French, because I don't get to speak French very often where I'm from. So Merci beaucoupe presentation commentaires politiques say on video. Says image politic, or in different medium. This is a politique et if.

The and the.

Systaime

Et OP. Artists.

I see.

And that's the actual.

Can I just follow up real quickly? 90 years ago many of the famous artists that we regard as famous artists were considered degenerate artists by certain political party. And I just think it's important for artists to hold on to their integrity.

Agreed. I think everyone here in this zoom would also agree. With that with that statement. So we are just about at time. I really want to thank the artist presenters. Really amazing salon, one of the best, I think that. I've been a part of. And you know, the translation is really amazing. Very helpful. That's basically all of the French that I know. But I was able to see what's going on.

Mercy!

Yeah, awesome. I hope you return. And I hope this opens the door to many more non English, speaking non primarily English, speaking people. Cause, you know, we embrace diversity around here. Just a quick note about the next salon. It's going to be. The April salon is going to be on April 3rd Thursday, as always, from noon to 1 30, and it's going to be a hybrid salon coming from the Cape Cod Museum of Art. And that's a collaboration with the Museum and the director, Benton Jones, who recently, you know, host. They hosted an exhibition of 2 Techspressionist artists work Renata Janiszewska, and Karen LaFleur. So this next salon is going to be taking place as a hybrid event at the Museum, and here on Zoom, and it's going to be basically talking a little bit about Renata and Karen's show.

Colin Goldberg

But also I'm going to speak a little bit about the history of Techspressionism for the live audience of the Museum, and Tommy Mintz, who curated the show in Brooklyn, who's also curating a show that's going to be opening in Chelsea, in Manhattan. Right around the same time. It's going to be the following salon. Actually, the June salon will be in New York. He's going to be coming on and talking a little bit about these exhibitions. So it should be a really good

Santo.

Absolutely. Yeah.

I see.

That. You know. That's a big part of what expressionism is about, you know, at least you know, that was something that I thought about initially when starting to curate shows with the group, is that there's a large bias within the art world. Obviously, we're kind of aware of that slanting towards white males. And so in the exhibitions, you know, I know that I personally have made a great effort to try to be as close to gender and neutral as possible, to be as diverse geographically, you know, ethnically whatever just in general, diverse as possible, and that ties into this idea that expressionism could function as a social sculpture in the in the kind of the conception of Joseph boys where work of art could be.

Colin Goldberg

You know, basically using structures in society as a medium to exert change. And I think that's something that you know we're all able to do by being self directed in the group. And, you know, creating our own sort of activities within it, such as exhibitions. Group activities and such. So, yeah, very grateful to have all you all, all of you artists involved, and you know, to have this thing keep going. So I'm gonna close the recording out in the just to keep the time limited. But anyone who wants to stick around you're more than welcome to stay for the after party and to continue the conversation. So once again, I'd like to thank all of the presenters. I'd also like to thank Renata, who's not able to be here with us today. For curating the salon and pulling all of you artists together. I thought, was there was a lot of synergy. So with that I am going to stop the recording in 3, 2, 1, and cut.