Nicolas Mériel has a declared fascination for flowers. The artist and photographer captures her complex, filigree beauty in extraordinary images – with around 10,000 photographs of mostly self-cultivated plants. When he became acquainted with the Berlin AI company Birds on Mars, a new vision emerged. Using artificial intelligence, the real flower motifs assemble their facets into new, beautiful art forms and reach countless smartphones via the Flamboyant Flowers app. The movers and shakers are all about more than that though: They want to show the possibilities of artificial intelligence and its digital processes – and point out the ease with which unreal realities can be created today. The art project grew out of this: GANs'N'Roses.
If you have installed the Flamboyant Flowers app, you no longer have to wait for Valentine's Day, but can look forward to daily flower greetings on your screen. Each motif is a work of art, the representation on deep black, which brings the richness of detail to the fore is indeed flamboyant. When you look at these wonderful pictures, you inevitably want to become a gardener – like the artist and photographer Nicolas Mériel. Its original data pool has long since produced new «crossings»; a diverse universe of species has emerged from the first, genuine generation. Birds on Mars reached for the stars and combined Mériel's handiwork with artificial intelligence and technical organisational structures. The experiment is a win-win situation for everyone: The AI specialists had the opportunity to develop their know-how in the application of the latest technologies, and Mériel delights the world with authentic floral beauties. So two worlds have resulted in an artificial and artistic third one. What is still blossoming out of the GANs, the Generative Adversarial Networks – besides beautiful Roses?
Last year, Christie's auctioned a work of art for the first time that was created by an algorithm rather than an artist. The computer-generated portrait obtained an incredible $430,000. As with the flower pictures of the Flamboyant Flowers, GANs were also responsible here, artificial network architectures that create something of their own on the basis of real data sets, learn independently and produce something new. It should be mentioned here that the data-based generation of new images in humans and faces is easier to program due to the lower complexity of components. Is that the future? Do digital processes replace human intelligence and creativity? The exciting collaboration between Nicolas Mériel and Birds on Mars is called GANs'N'Roses. The term does not only refer to the nature of the joint venture, but is to be understood even more as a joint art project. After the successful deployment of the GANs who explored the digital ecosystem and developed the most diverse new virtual breeds, they were presented in an exhibition at the Haus der elektronischen Künste (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel. «Flowers on Mars», the new generation of flowers with unseen, surprising properties and a natural-looking aesthetics that makes you forget the technology it contains, is entitled Flowers on Mars. Could this be the flora of the future? Could these species exist for a long time in a parallel universe if virtual reality knows about them? With the help of data, humans become gardeners of artificial intelligence and creators of new forms of life – a beautiful picture. The aesthetic motifs make the technical aspect seem far less threatening, even though the exhibition does not merely aim to inspire people to think about evolution and to inspire them with beauty. It is also about questioning our modern digital world, in which realities can all too easily be changed or distorted. Are GANs in our modern digital culture today the GUNs, the weapons used in the sense of a «fake new world» to spread false truths and manipulate? Thus, GANs'N'Roses can certainly be seen as an ironic impulse with a serious background: the extravagant, hyperreal flowers as a symbol of the current trend towards a fake, dazzling presentation of ourselves or our circumstances. Or as an unstoppable multiplication of pretended identities to influence political debates or elections. GANs'N'Roses is undoubtedly a project that fascinates us on several levels. It is ground-breaking future technology, modern art worth seeing, socio-political dynamite with high topicality. So it's good that the exhibition of pictures and video installations can be seen until the end of January 2020 at the Hall of Fame Studiogallery in Lachen, as well as on a long-term basis at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin. Talking about future technologies: There is also one thing we can’t forget with GANs'N'Roses: If Nicolas Mériel hadn't sown, planted, cultivated, watered, cut, staged and photographed in years of time-consuming manual work, the data basis for the AI process wouldn't exist either. So in the beginning there was after all – humans.
