Picasso’s Dreams

Picasso’s Dreams is a projection mapped sculpture which explores the parallels between Cubism and General Adversarial Networks as well as the relationship between an artist and an AI jointly creating a work.

To create this work, I created a script that searched the internet for images tagged as cubist paintings and manually created a data set of thousands of cubist portraits (or at least what I deemed to be a cubist portrait). I then “trained” a General Adversarial Network called stylegan-2-ada on the currated data set.

General Adversarial Networks are a type of artificial intelligence which pits two different AI programs against each other. One program, the “Generator” attempts to create new plausible images. Another program, the “Discriminator” looks at the output of the Generator and determines if it is a real or fake image. Real being close enough to the examples in the data set of Cubist works. The result of running this model for an extended period of time is a model of what it means to be a cubist portrait. A series of “weights” which can be searched and output images that appear to be new cubist works.

I take this model and use it to generate hundereds of new portraits which are used as keyframes to make animations that warp through the n-dimensional space of the model. These animations are projection mapped onto the multude faces of the sculpture, a 2.5-D work made from PVC based on Picasso’s "Two Women On A Beach".

Cubism aims to reduce complex figures and scenes into minimalistic features which when presented next to one another, allow the viewer to understand a figure from multiple perspectives at one time.

General adversarial networks pit two AI programs against one another processing a large set of example images (in this case thousands of cubist portraits scraped from the internet) and create a model which represents the idea of what a cubist portrait is.

This projection mapped sculpture both represents historical cubism, presenting multiple perspectives of a 3D scene as well as a multi-dimensional perspective of a n-dimensional model of an artifical intelligence’s concept of what a cubist work is based on the data fed to it by the human artist. Neither the human nor the AI can claim full credit for the work, it is the result of their combined effort and the legacy of the cubist painters and the engineers who developed this cutting edge program.