Zach-LookingOutwards-3

I’m a fan of this Twitterbot @deepforger.

The bot takes Twitter users’ input in the form of a tweet with an attached image, sent to DeepForger. Be default DeepForger will compute and tweet its output image, redrawn in the style of a randomly selected famous artist. (Users who have a particular artist or style in mind can request these by adding filters like +Picasso or +watercolor to their requesting tweet. These and further instructions are available on Alex J. Champandard’s (the creator’s) site.)

Of DeepForger’s pictures I’ve seen, my favorite by far is this portrait “using techniques of Jackson Pollock,” because of course that’s absurd. Jackson Pollock didn’t paint portraits—he painted raw emotion on the canvas in his drip paintings, about as far as you can get from figural! The machine learning algorithm producing these doesn’t know that, though; all it sees are lines, colors, backgrounds, and some interesting computer idea of what “composition” is. And so it has no trouble using Pollock’s “techniques” to paint anything at all.

It’s a new sort of art, built out of the bricks of the old.