Helena’s use of GANs is the modern-day equivalent of da Vinci grinding his own pigments —Grady Booch

Helena invites you on this behind-the-scenes tour as she goes over her experiments with AI as a new artistic medium. She starts with general principles of AI Art making process, its roots in the computational generative art landscape and its tools based on deep neural networks. How does AI art reflect visual truth in times when breakthrough research allows to generate diverse images with photographic accuracy, in our increasingly AI-driven world? From that perspective Helena examines how imagery produced by generative models could be similar to human memory - as collages, as compression and distillation of previous events. Going from general to personal, Helena shares her approach to AI art making for which she coined a term - Folk AI Art: though made using state-of-the-art technology, it aims to carry on traditions of folk art - beauty, humor and craft.

Presenter Bio

Helena Sarin

Visual artist and software engineer, Helena Sarin has always been working with cutting edge technologies, first at Bell Labs, designing commercial communication systems, and for the last few years as an independent consultant, developing computer vision software using deep learning. While she has always worked in tech, Helena has been doing commission work in watercolor and pastel as well as in the applied arts like fashion, food and drink styling and photography. But art and software ran as parallel tracks in her life, all her art being analog… until she discovered GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). Since then generative models became her primary medium.

She is a frequent speaker at ML/AI conferences, for the past year delivering invited talks at MIT, Library of Congress and Capitol One. Her artwork was exhibited at AI Art exhibitions in Zurich, Dubai, Oxford, Shanghai and Miami, and was featured in number of publications including the recent issue of “Art In America” magazine.

https://www.instagram.com/helena.sarin/