Project Description

“Obvious has teamed up with German graffiti artist Kai “Raws” Imhof to produce the new work, which is based on one of his painting and ancient art from the famed French cave art complex Lascaux. “ artnetNews

 

OBVIOUS X RAWS – Artificial intelligence meets urbanart and caveart

Obvious and RAWS are presenting a new artwork with the collaboration of Lascaux: Parietal Burner#1. The artwork is at the crossroads of street art, parietal art and artificial intelligence. This artwork was created using artificial intelligence through different steps:
– The training of Generative Adversarial Networks on images provided by Lascaux, resulting in the invention of new shapes and animals by Artificial Intelligence
– The use of style transfer algorithms to apply the style of reknown street artist RAWS on the animal.

The first signs of artistic realizations were discovered on walls, and allowed us to gain an insight on a step of our evolution where we were already capable of creating art for the purpose of transmitting a message to current and future generations. Today, walls are seen by many as a support for expressing a message which gave birth to a new movement, street art. This artwork combines those two movements using technology, resulting in a hybrid and timeless piece. We worked with Lascaux, one of the most famous sites where the most ancient forms of art were discovered, and trained Generative Adversarial Networks to create new parietal drawings. From this process, we obtained new examples of parietal art prehistoric animals invented by artificial intelligence. We performed this operation motivated by the ambition of highlighting the gap between the latest technologies and the most primitive forms of art. We then trained a second type of algorithms to learn from the style present in Raws’ artworks, and to translate this style on the drawings initially created with artificial intelligence. As a result, we obtained a contemporary reinterpretation of parietal art.