art
Beauty is in Your Mind, Not in the Rose

“When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind. It is a mental and emotional response that we make. We respond to life as though it were perfect. When we go into a forest we do not see the fallen rotting trees. We are inspired by a multitude of uprising trees…The goal of life is happiness and to respond to life as though it were perfect is the way to happiness. It is also the way to positive art work.”
‘Beauty is the Mystery of Life’, 1989
Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert
The Agnes Martin Gallery at the Harwood Museum of Art is an octagonal gallery with an oculus installed overhead, and four yellow Donald Judd benches placed directly under the oculus. The gallery was designed according to the artist’s wishes in order to accommodate Martin’s gift of seven large paintings made between 1993 and 1994, when Martin returned to Taos.
Artificial Intelligence and the Art of Mario Klingemann
Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Auction on March 6 features a unique creation by artist Mario Klingemann. Memories of Passersby I is a machine installation that uses neural networks to generate an infinite stream of portraits.
Sotheby’s Is Entering the AI Art Fray, Selling a Surreal Artwork by One of the Movement’s Pioneers This Spring
The technology used in the artwork heading to auction is cutting-edge, as no one else has been able to create a machine that can work to create portraits at such speed and at such a high resolution (and that can also fit into a small box to boot).
“I guess I have to thank everyone who plays computer games,” Klingemann says. “Thanks to the high demands of games, graphics cards have become extremely powerful and versatile.” He likens the power consumption of the system to the energy needed to run a fridge. That said, the real-time aspect and the high resolution took “quite some time” to perfect, according to the artist. All in all, he says, he spent about three months training the models, writing the code, and designing the installation.

Old GAN Masters
There is so much great work being produced right now from artists and designers who are using neural networks, code and algorithms to create. Sergio Albiac created this portrait series using a custom Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to produce a model from a deep learning system trained on a set of (mainly) dutch masterpieces. Via @DynamicWebPaige