BEAUTY BEYOND

Beauty Beyond is an audio-visual project spanning the disciplines of collage, sound, and AI generated art and music. The two track album, two fine-art pieces and book explore themes of iteration, temporality & creative destruction, as well as Human-Machine relations and machine learning.

Inspired initially by love for disused billboards on the London underground, the collage was created using cuttings from newspaper adverts to cover an A1 poster-board and then ripped up using a large kitchen knife. This method would produce one iteration of the collage, which would then be covered up by repeating the method over the top of the previous iteration.

This process of creation and covering up was mirrored in the creation of the sound piece ‘Human’. The room would be recorded as the collage was being made, whilst simultaneously playing the recording of the previous session into the room. This aspect of the project not only compliments and deepens the work’s themes of temporality and transformation through iteration, but brings in themes of space and place.

Once thirty iterations of the collage were completed they were compiled to create a dataset that was fed into Playform AI, a Generative Adversarial Network which uses machine learning to generate images based on input data. Thirty of the total 2500 images produced by the AI were selected to constitute the AI’s visual aspect of the project. These thirty images were then converted to audio by an image to audio software, and the resultant audio files were arranged into the finished composition by Wotja 22, a generative music system. The resulting album & book is an exploration of the juxtapositions, as well as the similarities, of human and machine learning and creation, and of human-machine collaboration in a creative setting.