For Friends
December 2023 - ?
For Friends is an ongoing collection of 360 portraits created out of the combination of generative systems of photography, coding, and AI.
For a period of at least 13 years, For Friends will be an exploration of the evolution of technology over time, the visual narrative of vast and ingenuous reinterpretations of a singular artistic instruction, and the unique intersection of the personal and the digital, encapsulating the essence of evolving friendships and my own artistic pathway.
Details
Each piece will be GIFTED to the friend being photographed. The friends I've made in the space have given me so much that it just felt natural to give back.
Now, about the pieces. As I said, each piece will consist of three parts.
A part involving generative photography
A part involving generative coding
A part involving generative AI
I’ll explain the reasoning behind each part.
Generative Photography
I've been intrigued by the idea of instruction-based artwork for a while. Duchamp and Sol LeWitt are just a couple of the various artists who have played with this concept before.
The base for For Friends is precisely that, an instruction. I like to think about it as if it was an algorithm made for humans, where the magic relies on the interpretation each of us gives to what the instruction says (and what it doesn’t).
The prompt is:
“Take a medium close-up shot of a friend where the body and look are centered, facing at the camera, and where the background is blurry.”
Clear enough to know what to do. Ambiguous enough to play with the interpretation.
After editing, the first part is done.
Sup. I’ll be using mint 0 (myself, hi!) as an example for the rest of the explanation.
Generative AI
Now, generative AI comes in.
We're living in the age of the AI revolution and wanted to incorporate this element into the equation. At the same time, I wanted the background of the portrait to add to the story of the photograph (hence the medium close-up shot). So what I decided to do was to add more background on the sides via generative AI filling. Important to note that the generative AI fill will be curated but not edited at all.
In the end, all pieces of the collection will have a 13:6 aspect ratio, which I think balances the weight of the background and the subject properly.
It will be fascinating to compare the difference between current AI outputs and future ones. Truth is, even if AI looks amazing today, can't imagine what it will look like +10 years from now.
The second part is done.
Generative AI is added to the portrait of The Friend.
Generative Code
The final part is incorporating the coding part. I created a short p5 script that The Friend needs to run to randomly select a color.
Yes, there are 360 pieces in the collection because each one will be assigned a hue of the HSB color system.
A color filter will be applied to the portrait, thus, finishing the piece. It is now ready to be minted.
On the left, the script running before running the code. On the right, the chosen hue after The Friend ran the code.
Voila. It’s done.
Cool fact before wrapping things up:
For Friends will be a years-long project. I love this part.
The idea is to be slowly minting these pieces once every two weeks. Sometimes more, sometimes less. At this pace, the 360 photographs will be minted in approximately 14 years!
Can't state how excited I am about this project.
You will definitely see some familiar faces in the portraits year after year.
I have no clue how the space will look in +14 years, but I'm damn sure I'll be here to capture it.
