Dall-E Print Workshop
When will AI image-generators accurately capture the nuance and detail of mark-making specific to printmaking? Or is printmaking's real-world material translation a distant future for AI's abilities?
Digital Workshop
Date: March 17, 2023, 11:00am CENTRAL
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About the Project
DALL-E 2 is a text-to-image system. Any input of a description, short-prompt, grocery list, text message, or gibberish sent to DALL-E 2 will output as an image which aligns surprisingly close with its instructions. While this AI is not the first to generate photos and artistic imagery, DALL-E 2 is able to articulate a request without any preset filters, with more accuracy than others before it, and responds fairly well to the request for a specific medium, be it photo, painting, woodcut, or pencil drawing.
AI experts claim that DALL-E 2 is getting “too close to human-level visual creativity. It can create anything you can imagine – and anything you can’t – from a single sentence.”(1) However, in all the DALL-E 2 generated artworks out there from the DALL-E team, from every-day curious users, or from artistic collaborators, such as the 2022 exhibition “Artificial Imagination” at Bitforms Gallery (2), these images lack a sensitivity to graphic detail which draws many artists to printmaking.
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“five mothers huddled tightly in a circle around their children, arms holding each-other in, their bodies becoming like one, drawn with higly expressive mark-making, and rendered as a black and white woodcut” by DALL-E 2
If for example, you asked DALL-E 2 to render in the style of a woodcut, the system understands that many woodcuts are printed in stark black ink on a whitish paper with the white as opening which pushes through the black. However, in the details DALL-E 2’s woodcuts marks could only be of a charcoal drawing or a pencil-rubbing. The marks do not capture how a blade chips the surface of linoleum, cannot recreate the rhythmic spacing of marks across the brim of a hat, as in “Sharecropper” by Elizabeth Catlett. While DALL-E 2 easily and eerily distorts and translate faces into graphic or expressive marks (often to a most disturbing end), the figures do not inspire empathy, express urgency, or show suffering “heaped mountain-high”(3) as embodied in “Mothers” by Käthe Kollwitz.
For this workshop we will discuss AI’s relationship to the history and theory of image and art-making. There are many historic occasions on which mechanical-reproduction caused deep existential crisis for artists and creators alike, such as the Arts & Crafts renaissance of woodcut in the early 1900s as a direct reaction to mass-produced lithographic advertisements. Questions of what makes analog vs. digital, mechanical vs. hand-made art good, meaningful, or beautiful will be explored through art-theory and digital journalism such as the recent book “The Future Is Analog” by David Sax.
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"The Mothers" (Die Mütter), Käthe Kollwitz 1922–1923
In September 2022, OpenAI made its artificial intelligence art-generator “DALL-E 2” publicly available. For this workshop we will employ DALL-E 2 and other AI art-generators as our master-printer and use our best language skills to challenge its ability to produce a print. We create a suite of collaborative, print-inspired AI images to used as inspiration for actual prints.
- Romero, Alberto. “Dall·E 2 Will Disrupt Art Deeper than Photography Did.” The Algorithmic Bridge, Medium, https://betterprogramming.pub/dall-e-2-will-disrupt-art-deeper-than-photography-did-b900b52c1ea2.
- Benzine, Vittoria. “In Pictures: Dall-e Makes Its Gallery Debut in a Show Where All the Works Were Created with an Assist from A.I.” Artnet News, 14 Nov. 2022, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/in-pictures-dall-e-makes-its-gallery-debut-in-a-show-where-all-the-works-were-created-with-an-assist-from-a-i-2208441.
- Mahler, Luise. “Käthe Kollwitz: Moma.” The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/artists/3201.