palabras y todo lo demás

palabras y todo lo demás (words and everything else) is a collection released on the occasion of Digital Art Day in Málaga (Spain), on September 13th, 2024. A one day symposium around digital art, with 4 panels and an art auction consisting of wine bottles where the labels have been designed by 9 artists. All are generative collections, so each label is unique and signed by the artist.

Aside from taking part in one of the panels, I will be contributing with one artwork consisting of 78 wine labels. The name is "palabras y todo lo demás".

"palabras y todo lo demás" is a little tribute to chatting, conversations, sharing stories, fears, celebrations, debate and everything else that contributes to human progress or expresses human life in all its diversity.

It employs a reduced set of visual elements (women, men, cats, words / letters / scribbles, wine bottles) to metaphorically represent all sorts of communication. Text/words are a very important element, as textual communication has typically a prominent role. Words are distorted into scribbles at times, a sign of other forms of communication, of playfulness. People as the actors of human stories, cats as nature that accompanies us. Wine as a symbol for any element around which conversations unfold (also, wine is the chosen vehicle for this occasion to bring the art to the table, literally).

Four AI models have been trained on previous generative work by the artist as well as on children drawings (the artist's daughters). The ones trained on the artist's previous coded-generative work are based on Contrapuntos, Ecologías C and Entretiempos. The four models are then used to create images using a prompt that goes like this: "text in italic in a french wine bottle label where some words are women and some are men and some are cats white red and blue". I used some variations in the colours that I include at the end of the prompt. I also employ different weights to the different AI models that I use trained on my previous work. All these are just parameter expansions of the base concept / prompt.

Contrapuntos brings a pixelated style to the outputs that count with a stronger influence of this system. It also dictates some verticality in the pieces that count with a higher Contrapuntos weight. You can read more about Contrapuntos here.

Ecologías C mostly affects the composition. Probably due to the simple visual aesthetics of concentric squares on top of a flat background, the AI model here picks mostly these compositional elements. Some outputs show a strong separation of content, like square islands of visual content: these have a stronger Ecologías C contribution.

Entretiempos is used very lightly, almost to a very subtle effect. It sometimes shows up in compositions that have a less blocky layout. Again, it mostly influences composition and not much the style itself.

The model trained on my daughters' drawings is the one that brings more in terms of style to the outputs. It's basically in almost every output in a pretty prominent degree, with some outputs being mostly a result of this model. Which seems to me quite interesting: the more organic of the inputs to the models, the more the training picks up the style. Contrapuntos, Ecologías C and Entretiempos are quite geometrical, even if the Entretiempos outputs used to train the model were at times quite fuzzy as well. But the underlying geometrical structure is what the model seemed to learn from, mostly.

I find this combination an interesting avenue to explore: machine outputs that explore the world through randomness (the coded generative systems), human outputs that explore the same through early clean minds, unbiased (the children's drawings). The combination of which explores, again metaphorically, the latent space of human ways of sharing and learning.

The metaphor of "wine label" was used prompting the AI models as a base to lay these stories: as a result, poster-like images appear, and other less-structured images, bordering at times in full-blown celebrations.

You can view the whole collection here.

The artworks will be printed, signed and placed on the wine bottles that will be auctioned along with the corresponding NFT. The public sale will take place from September 12th to 22nd, 2024, with a private sale starting 24h earlier (get in touch if interested). 60% of the proceeds go to Fundación Alma Gil, which promotes modern, contemporary and digital art.

I first explored the fusion of coded generative and AI as creative tools in Ecologías, a piece for a show at Unit London, in ópera posthumana de gramática sintética (o el enésimo nuevo orden), i, a piece for Refraction DAO at Art Basel Miami, and more recently in a triptych around identity: identity studies: the naked (human/machine) self i-ii-iii.