At the festival’s Design London Shoreditch exhibition, artist Ben Cullen Williams presents a new video artwork titled ‘Self Portrait,’. The work dives into the centuries-old question of what a self-portrait can be, using the capabilities of generative AI to explore themes of identity, technology, and expression.
Williams began by prompting Google Gemini to describe itself, which led to a dialogue that became the visual framework for the project. To define the visual world a series of models were fine-tuned using Ben’s own photographs in collaboration with Google DeepMind Research Scientist Jason Baldrige. This process allowed Google’s generative AI image model Imagen to generate images that were imbued with some of the qualities of his photographs — Williams was interested in this blurring of lines between the creator and the tool.
Hundreds of these images were then fed into Flow, where Williams sculpted them into a final, looping video work. He describes this experimental process as “akin to working in a photographic darkroom.”
This new video work dives into the centuries-old question of what a self-portrait is and what it can be, using the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence to explore themes of landscape, identity, technology, human endeavor and expression.
