The Neural Portraiture Series, created in collaboration between photographer Julian Muller and digital artist Ken Koller, contemplates the relationship between perception and existence as we move forward into a digital-only reality. How do we perceive and relate to each other when our interactions and experiences are increasingly taking place in digital space?
Using portraits of people photographed on the streets of New York City as the source images, we fed these images into multiple deep learning networks* to generate brand “new” faces of people that never existed, but were based on real people. These images were then further manipulated and fed back into the system multiple times over until they became the final pieces we see today.
While these pieces will exist only in digital space, a portion of our proceeds will be donated to Coalition for the Homeless, an organization helping New York City’s most underrepresented population - homeless men, women and children.
*These pieces were created with multiple Deep Learning and artificial intelligence programs. These programs use GANs or general adversarial networks as well as other methodologies to generate, cross breed, and create entirely unique images based on source imagery.
