An Interactive AI Slop Portrait
- christinaphensy
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Go ahead, make art from my art...
What is the threshold when it went from the infinite image landfill to art?
In the 1960s, Pop Art took off. Commercial images were repurposed and then became fine art. Funny enough, over half a century later in 2023, the Supreme Court finally ruled Andy Warhol violated copyright laws by egregiously using Lynn Goldsmith's photograph of Prince. In 2016, Sara Cwynar took images of famous paintings "Picassos, two Francis Bacons, a Matisse, a Seurat, A Pollock, a Malevich," and repurposed them as wallpaper for the Prada Foundation. An actual Francis Bacon piece was hung on the wallpaper, composed of its corpse and others. Barbara Kruger used a photo of Marilyn Monroe to create "Not Stupid Enough." Roy Lichtenstein took struggling comic book artists' work and made it "fine art," which is actually being called out as stealing in our infamous 2023 year of calling out our dead pop artists. It has been well documented that he ripped off these images.
There are countless references to artists not only being influenced by other artists but sometimes literally just reappropriating their images, even illegally at times. I find it fascinating that despite this, people are suddenly very invested in protecting "artists' rights" and their imagery floating on the internet from being scrapped and reverse-engineered into an amalgam of weighted tokens and predictions. Why are people suddenly so invested? We are in peak imagery saturation in the post-internet age. No human can keep up and filter out the impressions. Unpopular opinion: get over it.
I made this interactive web-based artwork in response to the current negative sentiment towards AI art. I wanted to reappropriate the reappropriated images and then have the viewer make the final piece by smearing it as they see fit.
I started by uploading a photo of myself and some reference images to Midjourney to generate an image from text. I then deconstructed each select AI-generated image (4 total) in Adobe Photoshop. Next, I layered in screenshots of the grid on the Midjourney landing page gallery (these are other people's AI-generated images). Thus, I made a digital self-portrait collage of appropriated, appropriated images.
I chose the last image as my selected piece and then used Claude to help me code a script to create the final web-based interactive piece. Through all of these layers of appropriation and tools, when did I make my final mark as an artist?
What was the threshold when it went from the infinite image landfill to my art?
I thought, well, if I can't answer that, perhaps the viewer could. I enabled them to paint on the image and to own what they make from it. Surely, then it becomes their art?
