DA DA DA LI

This large digital canvas is an homage to the earlier works of the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

Compared to his better-known, later works which feature nearly photographic levels of detail, his’s earlier prints and paintings had a more “immediate”, and gestural feel, which I’ve tried to capture here in a portrait of a young Dali.

The portrait is made up of dozens of smaller images, each one generated using artificial intelligence (AI), and stitched together into a single, large canvas.

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The Surrealist movement was started by a group of artists in the 1920s who believed in unfettered expression of the subconscious mind.

I like to think of the vast number of images an AI’s training database as a kind of “collective visual unconscious”, and that when an AI paints, it’s expressing the subconscious of our media and culture.