“Bacon Flowers:” A Generative Exploration of Metamorphosis Between Human and Nature Through Combination of Works of Francis Bacon and Floral Imagery.” (2020) This work is an exploration of a theme of reclamation of human spaces by nature, the eventual decay of our memories, physical traces, and bodies. Taking a visual inspiration from such works as “Learning to See” by Memo Akten, “Dissection” by Lucile Lejoly, “Discover My Body” by Yames, and paintings of Francis Bacon, this project takes a technique of combining several datasets with little to no preprocessing to achieve unexpected or uncanny results (as initially demonstrated by Memo Akten).
As a result, several datasets were combined: a collection of paintings of Francis Bacon taken from the Internet and a flower dataset. The combined dataset was then used to train a StyleGAN2 model running on RunwayML service, which upon completion of training has generated the images for this project and a latent spacewalk video.
