Rob and Nick Carter, the dynamic husband and wife artist duo who have collaborated for more than two decades, have long been interested in testing the boundaries between the analogue and the digital, using everything from camera-less photography to neon and painting to transport historical processes into the present.
It makes perfect sense, then, that the latest group exhibition at RNat5A, the duo’s studio and public viewing space on Bathurst Street, takes up the fictional portrait as a theme, realistic, believable depictions of people who do not, in fact – as the title suggests – exist. TheCarters invited 23 artists (including Helen Beard, Will Ayres, Jonathan Yeo, and Gavin Turk) to use the website THISPERSONDOESNOTEXIST as a starting point to create new works. The website employs a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), to create “remarkably authentic and convincing images of faces”, Paul Carey Kent writes in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.
Of course, the prompt data fed to the GAN affects the results, and proves just how varied and rich the collision of creative minds with tech can be. Cyan Dee, who is, as Carey Kent points out in his essay, herself an alter ego, asked an AI what David Bowie would look like now, if Bowie was still alive. Meanwhile Liesel Thomas searched for an AI character that she felt she could use as a subject for a portrait in her trademark aesthetic. Rob and Nick Carter went for a direct approach: their two hour long film shows a flurry of faces from the website, at a rate of fifteen per minute. It’s mind-boggling stuff.
