NATURATA, NATURANS (2019)
This work celebrates the life of a symbol, as it is upheld by a group of people in a specific time and place, and explores how its meaning changes when it is deconstructed, synthesized and represented digitally. Placing itself in an ancient tradition of art theory, this work revisits the vexed question: whether the task of art is to represent nature as it is, or to replicate the generative activity that constitutes the essence of nature itself.
For this work I used a GAN designed for texture synthesis and trained several instances on varying 2D textures. I took the weights from the resulting trained models and interpolated them to create new models that would generate synthesized textures reminiscent of the original inputs but simultaneously with strange digital properties. The subsequent textures were used to transform the surface of a mesh realtime with WebGL and presented as a projected render.
Collaborator: Alex Gruz
