EYES ON CULTURE #003
28th September 2022
Sophia Sinot’s AI Beauties
EYES ON: Sophia Sinot’s grotesque faces
The London based hair and makeup artist, Sophia Sinot, uses AI to create experimental approaches to makeup looks. With help from Midjourney (one of the internet’s favourite AI text-to-image generators), she formulates unthinkable faces, uncannily made up.
And it’s not just AI that Sophia enlists when crafting these unreal images. Her discordencourages its members to have fun with the new genre and create their own looks with a #mid-beauty channel, for beauty-focused image creation.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
One of the most exciting takeaways from the recent onslaught of AI image making is its impact on creative process thinking across the arts. A new tool allows for new ways of thinking. And as applied to makeup, AI image creation makes for particularly interesting results.
The human face is often the most contentious part of an AI image with its mostly creepy outputs. Recognizable or not, human or alien, Sophia’s portraits turn the face into a space for experimentation. Distorted and exaggerated facial features which might usually break the image, now become its art. In these AI portraits, the human face becomes the canvas.
Collectible Crypto Clothes
EYES ON: The OG Cryptovoxels sneaker
Much like digital art NFTs which make cryptocurrencies their subject (e.g. Matt Kane’s Volatility.Art which is tied to Bitcoin’s price) some early Digital Fashion pieces look like NFTs. Their design refers to the technology on which they're registered.
The PIXLwear P1 Sneaker is a great example. Originally created in 2019 for the blockchain based world of Cryptovoxels, the sneakers are one of the first wearables made with a crypto native virtual world in mind. Their voxelized design — bright and chunky — has contributed to defining a new visual language of crypto clothing.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
As blocky as the chain they’re built on, these crypto clothes work to create the aesthetic language of a hypothetical digital world, one in which all digital assets are scored on the blockchain. Their rudimental look can be read not as a product of poor taste (and voxelization) but rather a self-referential commentary on the technology that built it.
This is interesting because, in theory, NFTs shouldn’t have a specific aesthetic or visual culture of their own. As an “invisible” technology that defines an ownership record and not the thing itself, the design should be unfazed — NFT or not.
But anyone with eyes on the internet can see this is not the case. A new visual culture has flourished around the technology as online users begin to construct the aesthetic parameters for a digital world built on NFTs.
Net Art’s Own Fashion Brand
EYES ON: Cory Arcangel’s very physical digital clothes
Works of art, a shop, a brand, a software company: the work coming out of the NYC based artist Cory Arcangel’s Arcangel Surfware project is as hard to categorize as it is to describe. Existing entirely in the space between the digital and the physical, Arcangel Surfware’s merchandise speaks to the excessively digital. As a counterpart to the playful software (e.g. Hail Mary) produced under the same name, the ‘brand’ brought a whole new meaning to soft-wear.
Digital art about clothes and clothes about digital art, Arcangel Surfware sold its collections of online attire through a pop up in Manhattan’s Holiday Inn conference room and later a flagship store in Stavanger, Norway.
WHY WE’RE WATCHING:
An online lifestyle brand? Tongue-in-cheek or practical wear for surfing the web? With physical creations — from fidget spinners to neck rests — tailored to speak to online needs, Arcangel’s designs cleverly tow the line between art and merchandise.
Not only does the work constantly mix mediums, swapping out physical wearables for images like they’re no different, but it also seamlessly switches between subjects. A focus on the very physical qualities of branded consumerism quickly switches to a study of overly online visuals. It flip flops between the weirds.