Recently, the rise of artificial intelligence art or neural network art, has surprised the art world and invoked some fascinating questions including what might be implied aesthetically, philosophically, or anthropologically by the work of art by a man-made machine. Made using intelligent algorithms and codes to generate composite visual outputs from patterns of fed information, the anatomy of resulting "faces" in this project, including their expressions and gestures, effectively follows that of real humans, a technological simulation of how a person would have looked. 

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Setting the now-existing non-persons into an AI network carrying styles of popular paintings from Western art history and transforming them into oil-like portraits, the faces will have been subjected to art historical archetypes: with a bias towards the ruling race, class, or gender, and weighted by fragments of representation, influence, and mythology. A painted, etched, or drawn representation was the general way to visually record somebody’s individuality (exaggerated, as is, or filtered). However, portraits have consistently been something other than a record in art history, as much as tools for political coding.

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Finally, another AI network animates the artistic portraits into motion, bestowing upon them life-like human expression and gesture. Thus, the artificial might draw heavily on the real: while the completed persons effectively do not exist, the AI consumes our own limited comprehension of the human mind (including our attempts to make organizations and meanings), and effectively learns from our own.

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​I am reminded of the 16th century fresco "Creation of Adam" by Michelangelo at the Sistine Chapel in Vatican city, one of the most replicated religious paintings of all time, reproduced in countless imitations and parodies. The word "of' is particularly interesting. Is he created or creator? In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger noted in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the shapes behind the figure of God appeared to be an anatomically accurate picture of the human brain. The idea of pareidolia was all at once viewed as a manifestation of psychosis, yet it is presently seen as a typical human tendency.

With the 100 Adams and counting in this project, one might ask: Whose face is this? Whose expression is this? Who created this? Who is this? Creation of Adam is a necromantic endeavor to invoke the biases within art historical portraiture, the tensions between art and artist, and at the same time a reflection on being and non-being, and the inimitable consciousness that humans possess. The outcomes are chimerical, but believable.

J A B,  March 2021

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