ART-ificial Intelligence: An International Women’s Day Celebration

As Women Techmakers Kuala Lumpur ambassdor, I held a International Women’s Day event at Google Kuala Lumpur.

As part of the celebrations, we presented “ART-ificial Intelligence: An International Women’s Day Celebration” in collaboration with 5 amazing Malaysian female artists, to celebrate their work and create experimental forms of art based on artificial intelligence models. This culminated in our International Women’s Day celebration on March 30th 2019, where we taught participants how to execute this technique programatically based on the works of our amazing female artists.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

ART-ificial Intelligence: An International Women’s Day Celebration

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the development of computer systems to be able to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence. AI is currently a huge buzzword in the media, and is touted as one of the fundamental drivers of the 4th Industrial Revolution. It is getting ALOT of attention from investors as well, with the potential to transform all industries, and is expected to contribute USD$15.7 trillion to theglobal economy by 2030.

One of the latest things to hit the art world is artificial intelligence in art. Last year, Christie’s sold a painting generated by an algorithm for USD$432500, 45 times it’s initial estimate. The actress, Kristen Stewart (of “Twilight” fame) recently co-authored a machine learning paper on using artificial intelligence techniques to redraw video frames of the new movie she is directing. She is using these techniques toprovide special effects in the style of an Impressionist painting in the upcoming movie “Come Swim”.

In art speak, a pastiche is defined as an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period (e.g. drawing your cat in the style of Van Gogh). With artificial intelligence, there is no need to spend hours drawing pastiches,, as a computer model can also be taught how to do this and programmatically draw art.

This technique is known as style transfer and is done using neural networks (computer algorithms modelled on the human brain). How this work is by feeding an artist’s painting (style image) as an input into the model, so the model can learn the artist’s style, and apply it to a content image to create the types of blended output images (the stylised image) seen below. You may have seen apps with a filter that transform your photos in the style of Van Gogh’s “A Starry Night”. However, this application of neural style transfer is not a simple filter- instead it algorithmically redraws the entire content image.

To celebrate International Women’s Day, Women Techmakers Kuala Lumpur has partnered with female artists in Malaysia to celebrate their work and create experimental forms of art based on artificial intelligence models. This will involve a social media campaign to share these stunning experimental works of art and celebrate these inspiring female artists. This will culminate in our International Women’s Day Celebration on March 30th, where we will teach participants how to execute this technique programaticallybased on the works of art of our amazing collaborators.

The artists that Women Techmakers are collaborating with for “ART-ificial Intelligence: An International Women’s Day Celebration” are:

1. Nini Marini

2. Poesy Liang

3. Khairunissa Zainal Abidin

4. Elissa

5. I am May

The programmer who coded these pieces of art based on the style of the artists is Qamra Jema Khan, current lead and ambassador of Women Techmakers Kuala Lumpur.