Tag Archives: Nature

Weronika Pawlak

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Safe Space

“Safe Space” is a combination of analogue portraits and images of landscapes created by the AI  algorithm gauGAN. The algorithm generates images based on drawings which I made listening to the young people describing spaces that make them feel safe and relaxed. 


The work was created as an attempt to understand human’s longing for a safe space that is often imagined as an ideal space, free from self-doubts and fears. After the past year, I had a lot of thoughts about escaping the situation in which we all found ourselves. Making “Safe Space” I was thinking about how we, as humans, deal with the necessity of feeling safe. My interlocutors often admit that sometimes a safe space means a very specific place for them, for instance, a secluded place, surrounded by trees and flowers. Sometimes they could find a safe space in daily life, within the city. The imagined places seem to be at the same attainable and unrealistic. The unrealistic human desire connects with an uncanny AI representation of the landscapes, which is a way to materialize and personalise these spaces. 


The landscapes generated by gauGan are combined with analogue portraits. The composition of a picture refers to classical XIX century paintings, which often showed a person with a landscape as a background. A melancholic, romantic atmosphere of longing for something combines with an unrealistic image created by the algorithm. Since the stereotypical thinking about AI is that it can create something in a better way than humans, I found the outcome, full of glitches and unrealistic shapes, quite comic. Because of its imperfection, it reminds me somehow of a human’s way of feeling.

THE PROCESS – PART I

I asked people to describe a landscape that could work as their „safe space”. Listening to their audio recordings, I drew a series of landscapes using an AI algorithm GauGAN.

THE PROCESS – PART II
The series of analogue photographs combine people and their AI landscapes. 

About Weronika

Weronika Pawlak is a visual artist and musician, born in Warsaw, Poland. Currently working on finishing MA in Photography: The Image
& Electronic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works with photography, video, installation and music. She often explores
some of the themes related to the relation between humans and nature, the post-capitalist world and escapism.

 

Hay Tung Yan

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Leaves

Nature is always an inseparable part of the Earth. It has been called the Mother Nature for a
long time in history. Leaf is one of the precious gifts given by the Mother Nature. They never
miss a year to carry on the cycle of death and rebirth, as every single life living in the planet
Earth do. How can we capture the beauty of trillions of leaves in a very limited time?
My creative works focus on using faux liquid emulsion technique to capture different

 forms of the leaves. I have made these image by transferring a slim film which hold the printing 

of leaves into water colour paper.

 

The body of work was inspired by the concept of fading and decay as a destiny of our life.
We always try hard to keep something we must have lost but is meaningful in our control.
Once the leaves fall down from the trees or plants, they gradually become dry and dull.
Water and nutrition leave them, vivid green colour no longer exist.
This would be the most fascinating moment of the leaves.

About Hay Tung Yan

Hay Tung Yan is a Hong Kong artist based in London, England. After finishing her
photography degree in Hong Kong, she started her master degree in Goldsmiths, University
of London. As an artist, she works in photography, media production and music.

Lucy Mudel

MA Digital Media – Image Making

biomorphic syntheses

biomorphic syntheses is created as a collaboration between the human image maker and machine learning image synthesis programs by training generative adversarial networks, including both styleGAN and artGAN. Renderings from these models are then used as assets in animation, reviving inanimate form to bring the appearance of life.

 

The project’s intention is to provoke a dialogue on how image makers can use digital programs as tools to enhance their artistic practice; as well as intending to illuminate the necessity of the creator’s input to generate the models themselves and new imagery.  At the beginning of the animation, one can see the actual visual outputs of the first steps of the artGAN learning what “surrealism” looks like. This work focuses on the idea of questioning organic design, concepts of novel being, animism, and interconnectedness of carbon systems in the forest mycorrhizal network as well as the digital network. This work creates a dialogue on carbon and pixel transfer, in both an environmental sense, data storage, and archiving.

 

This work is presented in a square format as both the styleGAN and artGAN output new images from transferred pixels of the inputted datasets using vector based square ratios. Deep learning systems also require a large amount of storage, subsequently requiring a great deal of energy. Presently this work has collectively required approximately 15 GB of storage. While it is difficult to measure the environmental impact of small scale deep learning models, training a single deep learning model can emit thousands of pounds of CO2 emissions.

About Lucy Mudel

Lucy is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, animation, film, painting, metals and sound. Some of the themes her work often explores relate to mental states, surrealism, psychology, nature, folklore and mysticism. Lucy graduated with a bachelor’s of science in Psychology, with particular focus on mental health, perception, wildlife conservation, virtual reality, as well as human and nonhuman behavior.

 

Personal website 

Instagram 

Yiran Wang

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Animals or not in the zoo

This project is a discussion about the identity of animals in the zoo. Are they as landscapes? Or as sculptures? Or as living animals? Is there an answer in their eyes?

About Yiran
Yiran Wang is from China, and she is studying MA photography: the image and electronic arts in Goldsmiths. She cares about personal experience and the sustainability of life. Her main researches are graphic images and photographic images. The works are based on fine art and tend to observe and experiment.

Personal website: https://cutenoodles.wixsite.com/yiran

Emily Yo

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

Comeontreetrees, 2021

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Emily’s research and visual approach keen on the trees on the street, between survival and artificial trees of investigation on photography. Emily explores the relationship with the people who live around their garden- trees, flowers, and topiary-and about where she goes and what she’s looking for in her personal views. Emily likes people and objects with tales to be told and backgrounds she can get a glimpse of. She would like to create a lovely way of living in the present. Moreover, Her MA at Goldsmith’s studies led her to understand those stories behind images. She involves the thinking process of image-making. Her aim in these images is to discover artificial, artistic trees. How people shape/maintains their trees in the yard. The two neighbors compete with each other. On the other hand, she has been discovering how the trees are in different areas, and species survive in different seasons. She has been looking for the same trees in different seasons. These experiences made her feel like she is a part of these trees’ life, in the meantime, such as parents looking at their children.

About Emily

Since 2020 pandemic has been beginning. She has been thinking about what is essential things for her to approach and where she could go. Nowadays, all these things can be experienced virtually, meet up with family, friends, and pets. She has been trying to be creative; She read, watches movies, and draws a little. These things help her to stay home. 

 

In her works- comeontreetrees, which is the ongoing works of her studying MA photography. This series of works has taken over the past 40 weeks. It explores curiosity, streets and cultures, and how the trees communicate within the walls of the houses on the streets. These experiences have dug deeper into the trees every day, but she also realized that freed from the constraint of lockdown restriction. These trees are her lovely company. They have been through the fall, winter, spring, and now it is summer. She is looking at them as friends.

Maksymilian Hryniewicki

MA Photography The Image & Electronic Arts

“Eden”

The photographs and quotes from the interviews invite the viewer to the vibrant world of London allotments. This unusual green urban paradise is just a pretext for a discussion on mental health, ecology, politics, food, urbanization, searching for sense, and ways to rebuild a healthy relationship with the planet earth. Welcome to the Eden not yet lost.