In anticipation of the visiting lecturer, Ben Ditto, I watched the talk below, this is so relevant to what I have been thinking about lately and he was a collaborator on the Machine Learning Dazed cover I looked at before. What I found interesting was the links he identified between beauty and identity, so I will attempt to explore this further. I also was given a lot to think about in terms of technology (AI, 3D scanning etc) and the intersection of philosophy and pop culture.
‘The future of beauty and aesthetic identity!’
Started working when it was an idea for a platform, the idea was ‘the future of identity’ and ‘changing the narrative of beauty from a prescripted version of what we think beauty should be into being about identity and a personal description of what beauty should be’ – ethos of Dazed Beauty.
Launch idea of Art Deco meets Sci-Fi meets Prog meets Art Nouveau (aesthetic focus).
We started talking about the philosophy of consciousness snd ‘what does it mean to have an identity?’
360 degree CGI world
3D scanning a bunch of beauty icons and we commissioned ten different artists to turn them into characters.
Princess Gollum turned into Albino Vampire Bat.
Personal identity and pushing what beauty means.
Slick Woods turned into a Clown Cyborg Insect.
New workflow – the thing that enabled all of this was technology (Unity, Real, Cinema4D).
Generative Adversarial Network – ‘drawing what it thinks are beauty selfies based on data we trained it with’.
Amazing point in history where Python Script and Github and stuff like that are very accessible to anyone – so it has opened up creativity within coding.
Artificial Intelligence and what identity means and how we are going to be generating content in the future (Instagram filters etc)
Everything we commission now, we try to make sure there’s some moving image element.
Imagined a future where we’re all wearing Google Glass but not shit. You can tell me what your haircut should look like and i’ll see what you want me to see – a speculative fiction kind of thing but it’s fun and engaging.
Introducing these ideas that are quite philosophical in a really ‘pop culture’ way.
Whats the real craft in CGI / Augmentation / AI ? How does that become indistinguishable from the human touch?
A digitised, interactive landscape of an alien planet on which new ideas of beauty and identity could spawn, as well as working with CGI artists to turn beauty icons into otherworldly characters, developing face filters with AR specialists and conducting a photoshoot with Kylie Jenner using images produced by a generative adversarial network to style her makeup and hair.