Transferred Portraits
An homage to three iconic Latin American women and their work, created with neural style transfer
TOOLS
TensorFlow (style transfer)
YEAR
2018 - 2019
From Camera to Me
For the course Ideation & Prototyping, students were assigned a "Pet Project": the aim was to work on an individual project, of any nature, and document it every day (for 11 days). I took this opportunity to draw, because I'm not particularly skilled at it and can always use more practice.
Given that I was studying away in NYU at the time, I searched for inspiration regarding the subject of my drawings around the city, but ended up finding it elsewhere - not in the great artworks or sight of New York, but in the piles of homework I had to get through.
I encountered three outstanding Latin American women in my course curricula: I read a paper on Frida Kahlo’s neurological conditions, had a class discussion on Rigoberta Menchú's activism, and watched a movie about Brazilian psychiatrist Nise da Silveira. These women's portraits ended up composing my work.
From Me to AI
In the course A.rt I.ntel, an assignment required students to create images using neural style transfer. This is "an optimization technique used to take two images — a content image and a style reference image (such as an artwork by a famous painter) — and blend them together so the output image looks like the content image, but 'painted' in the style of the style reference image" (TensorFlow).
For this project, I decided to use the drawings I had previously made of Kahlo, da Silveira, and Menchú as the "content" images, and searched for "style reference" images that reflect why each of these women is famous and important in her own cultural, social, and/or historical context.
As shown below, Frida Kahlo's "style reference" image is one of her painted self-portraits; Nise da Silveira's is a painting by one of her patients, given she's famous for using art "to develop a deeper and more personal understanding of the individuals in her care and the psychotic processes underpinning their symptoms" (Cambridge University Press); Rigoberta Menchú's is a photograph of Kʼicheʼ textiles, which she commonly wears as a representative of these indigenous peoples.
The final images:
