Thursday, August 31, 2023

Automated abstract art

 kw: experiments, simulated intelligence, art, generated art, images, prompts, abstract paintings

I wanted more pieces of generated art to use for Zoom backgrounds. I happened to see an abstract mural at a restaurant so I took a picture and looked it up. The artist was Lyubov Popova (1889-1924). I downloaded a couple of Popova's pictures and one by Zaza Tuschmalischvili (b. 1960), cropped portions of them, and in three sessions, uploaded each portion to Dall-E2 as a "seed" for some outpainting. The prompt for each session was the same with the exception of the artist's name:

Angular abstract painting in the style of [artist]

Here are the three results.


With the third one, by a living artist, I worked back and forth, eventually erasing nearly all the original seed, so it became more of an inspiration than an integral part. I like all three, though they are rather garish for use as backgrounds. For that purpose I lightened them by adding about 50% brightness to each, with this result:


Depending on the audience, one of these could be an appropriate background. I tried to create abstract paintings without specifying style; here is one of the results, based on the prompt

Abstract painting with vertical grain, melancholy color scheme, low key


The location of the color bar shows that I painted this in vertical orientation, then turned it sideways. Even lightened up, it seems inferior to the ones above, as a background at least.

For the sake of academic meetings or among those who love libraries, I also ran the prompt

A wall of bookshelves filled with books of all colors and many sizes

I outpainted it to two sizes. The smaller one, which is close to HD, I also lightened for use as a background. The larger one (with more shelves) is nearly 4K.


On an HD monitor these all fill the screen. On a larger one, the images with fewer pixels may not do so. This image competes in my affections with the "Big Library" image, shown in this post.

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