STARTS Regional Center in Brussels hosts artist Luc Tuymans for a residency on AI

The goal of the residency is to develop a “Personal Neural Network” that inspires the artist for the realisation of new works or new directions in the development of his œuvre. Therefore Luc Steels researches on an A.I. system that would deliver new stylistic and substantive ideas on the major artist’s productions. The old masters have always used technological (i.e optical) devices to research on their works, Vermeer almost certainly used the camera obscura, Canaletto used lensens and Ingres carried a camera lucida with him. The artist Luc Tuymans is thus interested in exploring the possibilities of an A.I. system as a new device for a painter in the 21st century.

Luc Steels and his team at Studio Stelluti have analysed all the paintings that were on show during Tuymans’ prestigious 2019 La Pelleexhibition at Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. They used several AI techniques such as pattern recognition and computer vision, the semantic web, natural language processing and machine learning.

FLOW will be an available open source for the entire community of artists, curators and historians via the platform Penelope.

The project is co-funded by the European Commission’s DG CONNECT, in the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union under the S+T+ARTS program. 

The results of these experiments will be discussed at BOZAR in Fall 2020 as part of the S+T+ARTS exhibition (Science+Technology+the Arts).