Self Portraits & Reflections
Reinventing both my own face and how I want to run my creative business
Much of the summer I’ve been lollygagging about, giving myself time to rest and enjoy the mental boost that comes from regularly synthesizing Vitamin D. And while I did manage to reduce mental chatter, I found myself thinking about what I wanted to work on next and how to craft a new strategy to continue my creative independence.
Self Portrait with Code
Every artist needs a good self portrait, right?
About a year ago I got an amazing headshot that I can use for all those fancy-pants art gallery and residence applications I never actually end up submitting. It’s a great mugshot but what I really want is something that captures both my likeness and the essence of my style in creating art. Something kind of like Vincent van Gogh’s self portraits.
But… I don’t paint, draw, sculpt, collage, etc. I’m effectively useless in traditional mediums so I needed to think of a data-driven solution. Looking at my headshot, I realized there was more than enough data to transform it or generate approximations that I could feed into my code.
I selected my Entropy collection as my basis — an algorithm that I continue to explore and am curating slowly which best represents the style of art I love creating. Each artwork is rendered from 7 to 13 stacked layers, each progressing from dark to light, large fragments to small, and an evolving comparator determining the compositional overlap.
Perhaps I could guide the layers of logic using texture maps generated from my photo?
We live in a wonderful world of AI magic, and so I quickly discovered open source models for generating depth estimations. It didn’t take much to add edge detection and feature masks for my mouth and eyes. These masks were then used to modify my code, including:
Warping the domain-space of the raymarch projection using the depth map to get a visual flow along the gradient as it transitions from near to far along my face
Adjusting the scale of fragmentation based on the luminance of the input image
Adding offsets and quantization to my eyes to increase contrast and readability
Ensuring the comparison logic builds up more as it reaches the near-point
You can catch a glimpse of the process of going from idea to functioning prototype in this “vlog” style video I was trying out. I ramble a bit, but there’s some fun stuff in there!
At present, I’m still generating samples and combing through the outputs in my impossible task to curate infinity down to one perfect self portrait. I should probably just pick a bunch and code up a “show random render on hover” method of presenting these.
Which, now that I think about it, might be the MOST suitable way for someone who codes algorithmic artwork to present a self portrait… 🤔
And of course…
I just had to try it out on a cute photo of my dog, Pistachio!
YouTube “Branding” Dilemma
At times, I worry too much about strategy and over-think things. And after having started my YouTube channel recently in a long-term effort to build an audience and professional creative presence online, I fell into that mindset for a while.
Every bit of advice I read or listened to about “doing YouTube” seemed to suggest picking a single niche and running with it. Makes sense, so what’s the problem?
I’ve never been able to stick with one thing for too long in my entire life!
I revel at being a multifaceted creative and love exploring new mediums. The past few years where I focussed solely on algorithmic art was an anomaly. And as the financial incentives have all but disappeared in that market, my other creative pursuits have started to come to the foreground alongside; music production, audio synthesis, maker builds, etc.
How do I reconcile my goals, my varied interests, and how YouTube seems to work?
TL;DR — By defining a “Personal Brand” around who I am, what I believe and my spirit, I can create content over time in a variety of mediums, while still having necessary cohesion.
Thus, I’ve renamed this newsletter to Audio-Visual Art & Design by Owen Moore to align with my more flexible perspective in what creative projects I chose to present to the world. I have plenty of algorithmic art in the works, but will also surface my interests in synthesizers and music production alongside. Ultimately, I want to bridge all of these interests together into larger scope experiences, but I need to remind myself to take one step at a time 😅
Roadmap Ahead
I’ll wrap up this newsletter with just a few things I want to commit to:
Bi-Weekly YouTube Videos — Every two weeks for at least a year. I need to get good at video production, storytelling, speaking on camera, etc. and there’s only one way to do that. It’ll be a mixed bag as I try different formats, subjects, filming techniques, etc.
Monthly Newsletters — I haven’t been consistent and that needs to change. I also need to force myself to share my work with others, and nothing beats needing photos for a monthly newsletter. I’m aiming for more “show” and less “tell” as I really enjoy that style when other artists hit my inbox.
Algorithmic Art — I have a prioritized list and going to get cracking on new works!
Generative Music — I’ve tinkered but am diving deep at the moment, more TBA.
That’s all for now, thank you once again for your interest and time!
Have a great September!