Artificial Intelligence, Digital, 2022

Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus was painted on canvas. That was visionary; a statement by both artist and patron. Wood was standard for fine art at the time, but canvas was cheaper, more adaptable, and casual by comparison, allowing work to be displayed not just in palaces, but crucially–in homes. It was accessible. Accessibility to tools and materials opened the gates to one of the most culturally significant eras in human history.

AI-Collaborative art is also radically accessible. Often browser based, operated simply by typing what you’d like to see, AI has reached the tipping point for removing the barrier–and badge–of human skill, and shows no signs of stopping. What are we, without skill? When everyone can create everything, what litmus for meaning remains?

Taste.

In cultural abundance, the House of Medici’s taste led them to champion some of the most important artists in human history. An intangible, intrinsic sense of the divine spark, felt inside, unexplainable and known deeply. An alchemy of the mind and spirit. Their taste was a skill.

AI-Collaboration is also alchemical in nature. It’s science and art. Poetry and code. Human and machine, discovering, conversing, adapting. One distills words from some internal, hidden place, then writes them down and gives them to the latent space–a Philosopher’s Stone, omniscient and deathless–and when the words appear again, they’ve transmuted into visions. These are beautiful, terrifying, nonsensical, poignant, and frequently reveal things about the writer they hadn’t known to ask. The writer catalogs the visions, often thousands of them, and painfully curates, by taste, only a few.

Venus Renatus uses AI to reinterpret The Birth of Venus with a new voice. AI learns about the world–and about us–by the information we feed it. From social media to cave paintings, the breadth of known human history is now largely digitized, and the AI model used to create Renatus has access to much of it. The piece reflects this in broadening the Greek myth of Venus to an aesthetic zeitgeist of our global culture, drawing influence from the Ukiyo-e, Superflat, Renaissance, Surrealist, Pattachitra, Impressionist, Hieroglyph, Pre-Raphaelite, and Pop movements.

The Birth of Venus is the described as the embodiment of divine love. Working with AI to find a shared vision of what that phrase means to both of us was fascinating. Together, we imagine her as harmony amidst complexity, asymmetry amidst the symmetrical, nude, but neither objectified nor ashamed. She is no longer Venus pudica, but Venus fiducia--an alchemical transformation that only comes with time and experience. She is center stage in the Theatrum Mundi. The next protagonist of our collective story. Is she human? Is she AI? Is she some combination of we will become?

She has a spark of the divine, hand-painted or dreamed into existence with the machine.