Have had lots of success with Style Transfer recently. With the addition of Style Transfer to some of our other artificially creative algorithms, I am wondering if cloudpainter has finally produced something that I feel comfortable calling a true abstract painting. It is a portrait of Hunter.
In one sense, abstract art if easy for a computer. A program can just generate random marks and call the finished product abstract. But that's not really an abstraction of an actual image, its the random generation of shapes and colors. I am after true abstraction and with Style Transfer, this might just be possible.
More details to come as we refine the process, but in short the image above was created from three source images, seen in the top row below, and image of Hunter, his painting, and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d Avignon.
Style Transfer was applied to the photo of Hunter to produce the first image in the second row. The algorithm tried to paint the photo in the style of Hunter's painting. The second image in the second row is a reproduction of Picasso's painting made and recorded by one of my robots using many of its traditional algorithms and brush strokes by me.
The final painting in the final row was created by cloudpainter's attempt to paint the Style Transfer Image with the brush strokes and colors of the Picasso reproduction.
While this appears like just another pre-determined algorithm that lacks true creativity, the creation of paintings by human artists follow a remarkably similar process. They draw upon multiple sources of inspiration to create new imagery.
The further along we get with our painting robot, I am not sure if we are less creative than we think, or computers are much more so than we imagined.