Anicka Yi §L£†×L, 2022
The work is a unique painting that is UV printed using imagery generated through a custom-made machine learning model. The painting has an almost holographic effect, its appearance shifts slightly as one moves. Photography cannot properly document this effect.
In what the artist has termed a “self-cannibalization” process, in 2022 Anicka Yi began a set of investigations into painting by training a machine learning model with images of her more painterly artworks. The artist worked in dialogue with the algorithm, deconstructing and manipulating her past work to prompt and guide the algorithm in unexpected directions. As Yi experimented with machine learning, she branched out to work in dialogue with several machine learning models at once. Each of these models started from the original “Anicka Yi” model, but then evolved in new directions by mixing in a profusion of novel imagery from algae, bacteria, and fungi, tissues and cells, flora and fauna, machines and electronics, paint strokes and fluid media, geological formations, and landscapes (aquatic, terrestrial, and cosmic). Yi conceptualized this process as hybridizing her own visual patterns and motifs (her visual “DNA”) with those of other ecological entities, living and non-living alike.
Each new machine learning algorithm created by Yi functions as a layer of “paint” and generates unique imagery, from brush strokes and washes of color, to blood cells and fish eggs, scratched and ruptured skin, clumps of algae, polyps and crustaceans, and the undulations of a deep ocean floor. Drawing from this abundant pool of unique imagery, Yi digitally collages the visuals to create an illusion of depth, layering foreground, middle ground, and background to synthesize the final digital painting.
The images that are generated using ML algorithms are hybrid in nature. They are based on a pattern that is abstracted from all of the combined photographic and representational imagery that is fed into the algorithm. This makes the images at once figurative (referencing real-world objects) and abstract (not reflecting visual reality, but instead concerned with pattern, form, color, shape, etc.).
The final physical painting is created by playing with layers of light reflection, distortion, transparency, and color to create an almost holographic effect. Yi’s intention was for the illuminated surface of the paintings to evoke an electric alien ocean, where optical physics are scrambled, reflections and shadow become illusory, and light flickers over the pale screen of a machine consciousness.
Genesis of the project: Following her early experiments with “soap paintings” from 2013–15, Anicka Yi started to investigate painting and imagemaking in earnest during 2020. Continuing a trajectory in her oeuvre that explores the concept of “biologizing the machine” (Venice Biennale 2019, In Love With The World at Tate Modern 2021, Metaspore at Pirelli HangarBicocca 2022), Yi wanted to interrogate painting’s mythical associations with individual authorship and the physical body of the painter, exploring how machine intelligence might affect the evolution of painting.