It’s amazing how just asking one simple question opens up a whole avenue of exploration. This last Tuesday, we had the latest Exploring Art session with the u3a. I think I mentioned in Tuesday’s post that I hadn’t prepared anything, as I hadn’t been inspired to research the topic of Circuses. At the end of that session, we were told that the next session would be about portraits.
What I like to do is try to find that different angle, and this time I did that by asking the search engine, what are the most extreme representations of a portrait. One of the first suggestions was Van Gogh’s The Chair – I might take a picture of a chair and ask ChatGPT to make an oil painting of it. Is it a portrait because it represents the person who sits in it – I could do the sofa, and do a Tracy Emin type thing – make it untidy, representing me. Is that a portrait – arguably, yes.
There are a couple of pictures that I will include in the presentation that I am going to prepare for the next session, but I’m not going to talk about them here until after I’ve presented to the group.
One thing I will talk about is the header picture. It’s obviously a portrait of me, but done in the style of Refik Anadol – as best as ChatGPT can. Anadol uses large datasets to produce some amazing images, https://refikanadol.com/works/ Well worth having a look.
I must admit, even doing this basic level of research has been fascinating.
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