Albena Baeva

A Woman Holding a Black Umbrella on a Street

2019

  • Albena Baeva, DFCLD, 03, 2019

    StyleGAN trained on mixed dataset, oil on canvas

    120 x 80 cm

The painting by Bulgarian artist Albena Baeva is from the series 'Dangerous Female Creatures Living in the Deep'.

With the support of Telilab at Sofia University of Technology, the artist was training a self-learning program, styleGAN, with datasets of over 60,000 images from the Internet. The datasets included images of women, fashion shots, and images of creatures from the sea. The artificial intelligence network is trained to produce images that resemble the training material. The lack of homogeneity in the training material causes the network to develop images that blend basic elements of the different image worlds.
These mixed creatures from an unknown, artificially generated image world in turn serve the artist as sketches for a series of paintings. In the painterly process, the images of women and creatures living in the deep develop a quality all their own. They become portraits, representations of women that address themes such as body image and self-perception, beauty, and perfection.

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