Artist Talk: 3:30&ndash\;4pm\, &nb sp\;Level 4 Gallery
\nReception: 4&ndash\;5:30pm\, \;Level 4 Gallery
\nArtist's Statement
Make Me a Landscape\, Do Not Include Any Sky \;explores t
he relationship between art\, nature\, and technology in the emerging age
of artificial intelligence. In collaboration with fellow artist (and tech
entrepreneur) John Brownell\, I used a collection of my paintings to train
a closed-circuit AI image model focused solely on generating &ldquo\;Ben
Bloch&rdquo\; style images. The images are brought about from text prompts
. So I could write\, &ldquo\;A lush forest\, fall colors\, green waters\,
do not include any sky\,&rdquo\; and get a striking result. It was like se
eing a clone of myself or hearing someone speak to me in my own voice. Thi
s new AI &ldquo\;assistant&rdquo\; could deliver completely original&mdash
\;and in a certain sense\, unreal&mdash\;scenes that mirrored my own signa
tures: high-velocity paint strokes\, ghosty charcoal lines\, and spots of
raw canvas sprinkled throughout a composition. Still\, these images tend t
o miss some of the tension&mdash\;and magic&mdash\;that the material of pa
int brings to canvas.
In some sense\, all landscapes are based on prompts (be they nature itself\, or a representation/memory of nature)\, a nd I wondered\, what might these images\, based on a custom visual languag e model\, have to offer to a landscape painter? What would happen if I rev ersed the feedback loop and re-rendered them in paint on canvas? What coul d AI&mdash\;which is\, after all\, a human creation&mdash\;have to tell us about our \;human designs?
\nThis series is borne of those ques tions. Artificial intelligence has wrought many anxieties\, yet I think we mostly now agree that some form of it is with us to stay\, and really onl y just getting started. New and ever more AI-tinged experiences are daily creeping into our lives: communications\, self-driving cars\, VR headsets\ , voice\, video\, and song generators\, shopping assistants\, and even vir tual &ldquo\;soulmates&rdquo\; are all things that now have a foothold in our world. It&rsquo\;s as if we are watching the Internet (which is still in its infancy) become a walking child: absorbing\, responding\, and amass ing at a rate so astonishing and overwhelming that it can leave us in disb elief.
\nThese paintings are not\, however\, a mere product of AI. T hey are my personal creations\, and perhaps doubly so: a mise-en-abyme of my experiences with nature\, art\, and the will to create. Hopefully\, oth ers will receive them as something both familiar and newly strange\, and p erhaps something compelling\, even artful.
\nArtist's Bio
\nBen Bloch \;is an artist living and working between Uta h and Montana. He earned MFAs in Painting and Creative Writing from the Un iversity of Montana in 2002. Before deciding to focus on landscape paintin g\, he was a co-founder of the arts collaborative Goatsilk\, and he built and ran an experimental art space by the same name in Missoula from 2002-2 004. During these \;years\, he also wrote an arts and culture column f or the \;Missoulian \;newspaper. Before moving to Salt Lake City i n 2015\, he was a visiting professor in new genre arts at Whitman College and a resident artist at Central Michigan University. Along his journey\, he has also worked as a carpenter\, an inventor and entrepreneur\, co-crea ted the web series &ldquo\;Killin&rsquo\; It with Paul Crik\,&rdquo\; and been a technical writer for a software company. He has received an NEA gra nt as a National Parks artist-in-residence\, and his work has been feature d in the UK \;Guardian\, \;Hyperallergic.com\, \;Aspect: The C hronicle of New Media Art\, \;Public Art Dialogue\, and G4TV's \;A ttack of the Show.
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