Not A Photograph - Empathy evoking portraits created by AI
What is artificial and what is real? How much empathy can an image generated by a machine evoke?
The project “Not A Photograph” invites you to find answers to these questions.
The fish seller from the weekly market, the student next door, the pensioner from the park and many more – the portraits are as diverse as society itself, showing people of different origins, ages and professional groups. They capture the essence of the characters and tell unspoken personal stories.
None of the portraits are photographs of a real person. The artist Arup J. Paul created these images using the latest generative AI technology and a data model created specifically for this purpose. Through empathy-evoking portraits, he would like to draw attention to the possibilities of generative AI and initiate a dialogue about the social effects of generative AI, especially in the visual field.
FastestGrowingForest
#FastestGrowingForest is an open concept, a thought process, and an art initiative to raise awareness about deforestation and climate change
Nature is everything, the air we breathe in, and the water we need to survive all come from mother nature and the forest is an integral part of this living ecosystem.
As we live in a city surrounded by all the amenities we tend to forget what it means to have a healthy forest for our very existence. The #FastestGrowingForest concept tries to push us to think about the needs of the forest with the help of art. Art can trigger emotion, feel a sense of belonging, and build the urge to act.
Under the umbrella of #FastestGrowingForest we bring all the forms of art, be it visual art, performing art like dance and music, and even with the help of cutting-edge digital technologies such as Generative AI and Augmented Reality (AR) we try to tell a story of the forest.
As we progress with the projects, the #FastestGrowingForest hashtag will be used to share information about the projects and raise awareness about the importance of preserving the forest. The projects under #FastestGrowingForest will seek to partner with environmental organizations to raise funds for reforestation efforts and other initiatives aimed at protecting the forest.
The FastestGrowingForest concept has been co-developed by the
Forum für Deutsch-Indische Völkerverständigung e.V. (FDIV e.V.).
View a selection of paintings from the FastestGrowingForest series
Uncontrolled Lines
“Uncontrolled Lines” is an experiment where visual art interacts with performing art and vice versa in an improvised, uncontrolled setting.
Inspiration comes from everywhere, when Paul is listening to the live musician playing new cords he tries to jot down spontaneous sketches of the instant impression of how the music is being perceived. These art pieces can be drawn with charcoal on a piece of large paper or a with oil paint on a large canvas. Whatever it might be “Uncontrolled Lines” art pieces are being created as an experiment in front of a live audience.
Likewise “Uncontrolled Lines” doesn’t just stay within the boundary of live music performance but rather goes beyond and incorporates other performance art like a dance. When a dancer poses a character Paul takes an impression of that live pose and comes with an instant abstraction of that information into a piece of visual art.
