BARRAT/BARROT: Infinite Skulls

This work was produced in confrontation (and later collaboration) between me and Ronan Barrot; a French painter who I've come to deeply admire over the course of our work together.

Ronan paints scenes and landscapes; but whenever he pauses work on a painting or finishes a painting; he will use the leftover paint on his palette to paint a skull. Because of this; over the past few decades he has created thousands of uniformly sized skull paintings. The resulting work together focused on using scans of these to teach a neural network to create images of paintings of skulls; then Ronan would give feedback (whether it was just his thoughts directly, corrections of different generated skulls, or production of new skulls introduced into the dataset with the intent of "disturbing the machine").

It was not just generating images of skulls with a GAN and hanging them next to Ronan's - there was a real argument and dialogue between me as a new media / AI artist, and Ronan as a very traditional artist; ourselves, our processes, and our ways of working.

The show took place on February 7th, 2019, at L'Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris.

None of this would not have been possible without the help of Caroline Vossen and Albertine Meunier; who introduced me to Ronan in the first place- and continued to help me greatly throughout the collaboration.

From left to right: Ronan Barrot, Robbie Barrat, Caroline Vossen, Albertine Meunier

Images are below- but first; please view the above links. Our work together was a conversation and not just images alone.

Left: The "Infinite Skulls" installation; the system continually generates skulls with a counter at the bottom ("crânes générés" / "skulls generated"). It sometimes will speed up the process, to show that the machine can produce skulls faster than Ronan.

Right: The "Peeping Skull" installation; the viewer looks through a peephole and presses a button to generate a new skull (based off of "epoch 2" of our collaboration, once Ronan had created paintings to reply to the first group of generated skull images). This is to give the viewer their own unique skull that will never be seen again, in correspondance/fulfillment with Ronan's pre-existing wish "to paint one skull for every Frenchman".