My final project is a result of a long road of trials and tribulations, technical problems and research about how to make things work when they refuse to work. Ultimately it has led me to use machine learning scripts that are run through a free cloud GPU offered by Google, because my poor Macbook Air could never handle such tasks. The process I’m using to generate these images is called a Style Swap, where the model requires an input of two images at a time, one as the base image, and the other as the style that will be applied. An easy way of understanding this is imagining a picture of a landscape and then applying a style taken from Van Gogh’s painting to it. I decided to utilise it in a more experimental way that fits my subject and created “body landscapes”. The base image - a landscape - becomes a grotesque, fleshy scenery when the characteristics of the second image - a part of the human face or body - are calculated into it. I then take those images and bring them to the real world by painting them. This doubled interpretation that occurs between the human and the machine is a process I’m very happy to explore with my work.

This project has changed a lot in the last three months, mostly due to my personal life events such as going back to my home country, getting stuck there due to the pandemic, and many technical difficulties that came at me all at once. Turns out being flexible with your work is a very important skill for an artist working with any kind of tech, as these things can be absolutely brutal and unforgiving. I tried to stick to the original core idea of the project, still keeping it focused on distorted images of the human flesh, but because I couldn’t pursue the medium I have initially chosen, the output changed quite a lot. Personally I think this turn of events was quite fortunate, a sort of blessing in disguise. I had a chance to prove to myself my own creativity and I resolved issues that were prominent in the previous version.

The space I chose for presenting my work is a bathroom stall. A place so specific has to have some meaning to it, right? When I was trying to decide on the space that would hold my paintings, I wanted it to be small and private, as secluded from other works in the space as possible. I wanted to create an effect of immersion to some extent, so the viewer could feel surrounded by the works and not only look at them hanging on one wall. Besides the paintings there is also a video projection on the ceiling that adds movement and lives up the still image displayed there. A bathroom stall is in itself a private space that people usually enter alone. I like that it can invoke this feeling of isolation. The subject of my works also fits the space, they look a little gross.