The Sacred and the Profane (Neural Art)

I’ve been further experimenting with neural style transfer techniques – and have always wanted do something with Buddhist art. I’ve always been uninspired and disappointed by modern Buddhist art, I guess though these are mere worldly expressions that don’t really aid one’s quest on the path. However, I feel obliged to try my hand. The ‘art’ in neural style transfer is finding the right source imagery to best suit / express want you want. In these examples – I used a flame fractal – full of repeating geometry, sweeping curves, and lots of recursion. When applied to some Buddhist statues and iconography – it gives it a certain sophisticated, scientific, mathematical feel – yet hand made with love and care. Buddhism is a science of the heart and mind.

Now, having been pleased with these results – I turned my mind to something quite random. I like subverting things, particularly imagery. I thought what would pornographic imagery look like through these filtered changes. So I applied the style transfer using the same flame fractal – and the result is kind of horrifying and creepy. And then I realised that this is very much connected to the Buddhist path – where it is a common meditation practice to contemplate the foulness and disgust of the human body in order to release one from desire and lust – more of a practice among dedicated monks than of lay people, understandably.
Anyway – it got me thinking about the neural theme throughout – the process is about understanding human perception, and changing it – very apt…

Game of Thrones fan art

Was wanting to get back into Processing, and no better way than attacking Westeros, filmed not far from where I live in Belfast.

The technique is quite simple, a radial repeating pattern(based on the ‘golden angle’ seen in the patterns of flowers / seed pods etc) that uses sprite images relevant to the character.  For Tyrion, I took the actual swords from the Iron Throne to build up his image, and for Daenerys I used various scaly dragon scales.  The brightness of each of these is controlled by an underlying portrait photo.

 

Context Free Art

A Lovely, easy to use piece of coding art software I’ve been playing around with,

http://www.contextfreeart.org

Nice errors

Currently developing my next concept based around infinitely recursive 3d crystal structures, but when doing some initial tests on densely layered subdivided polygons, my toon shader, which is only supposed to render the outlines, got very confused by the thousands of overlapping shapes and spat out a nice charcoal like effect, in error.

‘Hand’ & ‘Portrait’

‘Hand’

 

‘Portrait’

 

 

Made with the Python programming language inside Cinema 4D.