Feature: AI, the new research partner
Masterworks of art history, with a glitch in the matrix
Jonas Wyssen, an artist from the canton of Valais, has exposed world-famous paintings to AI algorithms. His goal is to imitate images and styles – a process called ‘appropriation’ – while always incorporating unsettling errors. We take a look at his surreal, dreamlike creations.
The most revered smile in the world has undergone appropriation by modern technology. AI and the artist have here turned the ‘Mona Lisa’ into a robot – including her smile. | Image: Jonas Wyssen
A rocket here fractures the quiet idyll of Claude Monet’s first Impressionist painting: ‘Impression, soleil levant’ (1872). It’s as if we sense the downfall of Nature in the glow of the sunrise. | Image: Jonas Wyssen
A self-absorbed look at a tablet screen. John William Waterhouse’s ‘Echo and Narcissus’ of 1903, adapted for today by AI and a human being. | Image: Jonas Wyssen
A DJ disrupts this Cubist work by the early 20th-century Russian painter Lyubov Popova. | Image: Jonas Wyssen
In this appropriation of Salvador Dalí’s most famous work, all kinds of things merge together: an electronic device, our own epoch, input from algorithms, and human creativity. | Image: Jonas Wyssen
Art meets AI meets art
This is a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo – though it’s admittedly an odd version. The artist Jonas Wyssen from the canton of Valais has exposed several masterpieces of art history to AI algorithms – or, rather, to his sophisticated input code for AI algorithms. Wyssen’s aim is to copy and imitate paintings and styles quite consciously – which in art is a process called ‘appropriation’ – but while always incorporating a “glitch in the matrix”. His surreal, dream-like creations are confusing. What is real? What has been created by the AI? What’s actually by the artist? And what is art anyway? | Image: Jonas Wyssen
