Sequels

Appalachia, West Virginia, 1964

During a journey through America in 1964, Meyerowitz stumbled upon a captivating scene in Appalachia, West Virginia. Here, he photographed a shack that doubled as a home, where a surreal scene unfolded with a child playing atop a car and another swinging a cat. This chaotic and otherworldly moment seemed to freeze time, offering a glimpse into a life far removed from the ordinary.

Sequels #224

[alignDRAW](https://aligndraw.fellowship.xyz/) (2015). The first text-to-image artwork.

By early 2015, neural networks had mastered the art of 'image-to-text' and could create natural language captions for images. Flipping this process, and turning text into image, was a much more complex challenge solved by 19-year old prodigy Elman Mansimov's alignDRAW model.


Fellowship is pleased to present a special release of **fully on-chain*** NFTs of this historical artwork, containing all the original 32x32 pixel images created in 2015.

*These images represent the birth of text prompt AI generated imagery.* - Darius Himes, Christies

*alignDRAW images can be compared to the first fixed photographs taken by Nipce in 1826-1827.* - Dr Lev Manovich

*We created an architecture that allows for the progressive on-chain storage of data and images, strategically addressing the challenge of high gas costs at launch through a phased roll-out that capitalizes on periods of lower gas prices.

alignDRAW

[alignDRAW](https://aligndraw.fellowship.xyz/) - the first text-to-image artwork from 2015.

By early 2015, neural networks had mastered the art of 'image-to-text' and could create natural language captions for images. Flipping this process, and turning text into image, was a much more complex challenge solved by 19-year old prodigy Elman Mansimov's alignDRAW model.

Fellowship is pleased to present a special release of both print editions and **fully on-chain** NFTs of this historical artwork, containing all the original images created in 2015.

*"alignDRAW images can be compared to the first fixed photographs taken by Niepce in 1826-1827."* 
Dr Lev Manovich

*"These images represent the birth of text prompt AI generated imagery."* 
Darius Himes, Christie's

A picture of a dark sky #112

A picture of a dark sky #82

Post Photographic Perspectives II: Acceptable Realities is Fellowship's second group show celebrating a new wave of innovation in AI video and photography.

The word "Overture" carries a rich history in the realms of art and music, typically associated with classical and traditional forms. However, beyond its connotation as the introduction to an opera or play, it possesses an additional meaninga prelude to something of greater substance.

The era we inhabit serves merely as an overture to what lies ahead. Presently, we witness the nascent stages of AI gradually unfolding and aiding humanity, whether in mundane daily tasks or in unraveling the planet's most intricate mysteries and challenges. We have merely glimpsed a small fragment of the imminent Future, which forms the core message of "Overture" itself.

Overture is produced through a complex process that utilizes four distinct AI tools, and stems from training AI on our own vast 15-year archive of cinematic photography.

Overture by Synchrodogs

The word "Overture" carries a rich history in the realms of art and music, typically associated with classical and traditional forms. However, beyond its connotation as the introduction to an opera or play, it possesses an additional meaninga prelude to something of greater substance.

The era we inhabit serves merely as an overture to what lies ahead. Presently, we witness the nascent stages of AI gradually unfolding and aiding humanity, whether in mundane daily tasks or in unraveling the planet's most intricate mysteries and challenges. We have merely glimpsed a small fragment of the imminent Future, which forms the core message of "Overture" itself.

Overture is produced through a complex process that utilizes four distinct AI tools, and stems from training AI on our own vast 15-year archive of cinematic photography to become an entirely new artistic creation utilizing neural networks. This amalgamation remains a natural extension of Synchrodogs' oeuvre, rather than a fusion of disparate and incongruous styles.

Overture #33

Overture #28

18 artists. 18+ unique pieces of art. Artist names revealed only after the mint.

Welcome to the latest season of PROOFs marquee art collector experience. Minting is open December 15 - December 17. Artist reveal December 17. To participate in the mint, purchase a mint pass: https://opensea.io/collection/grails-v-mint-pass

Browse the full Grails V collection at: https://proof.xyz/grails

View past seasons: https://opensea.com/category/proof-grails

Grails V

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach is the first book that my father gave to me. 
To this day I think about the seagull who aspired to fly higher, contrary to the rest of the flock, and was exiled for going against the rules. 

Its not just about breaking limits but also forgiving and understanding others even if they cannot change. 

Let go and be free.

Migrating Has No End

Migrating Has No Beginning

In a nod to John Baldessari, the artist makes 36 attempts to generate an image of three balls thrown in the air to make a straight line. 

Each attempt was generated by giving the prompt "three balls thrown in the air to get a straight line" to Stable Diffusion 1.5 (the default model used by stable-diffusion-webui), using the default sampling method, number of sampling steps, and CFG scale. 

While the original series explores randomness through a futile attempt at capturing three physical balls aligned in a specific configuration, this series explores randomness in a different way: through a futile attempt at generating coherence all together.

"three balls thrown in the air to get a straight line" attempt #35

Painting with Fire presents a vignette of transformation: the evolution of GANs from 2014 - 2023 seen through the eyes of fire. Using 14 vintage GAN models, Ionson articulates the emergence of synthetic image generation. Ionson explores fire as the quintessence of humanity's relationship to both innovation and destruction, embracing the unexpected abstractions of classic AI as a distinctive aesthetic statement.

GAN (generative adversarial network) technologies were developed by researchers and programmers but then utilized by artists. Though the technology was invented to make the images as realistic as possible, Brd subverts this to use it chaotically and abstractly; the opposite of what the AI researchers had in mind. This project celebrates the innovators and artists who have brought synthetic image generation to life with models such as the aiCAN, DCGAN, Stylegan 1, 2 & 3, bigGan, biGAN, pix2pix, AttnGan and more.
https://bardionson.com/painting-with-fire/
a Sovrn Curated release

Painting with Fire: A History in GANs by Bard Ionson

Water and fire entertain us.
Channeling the fire myths of the world, Prometheus, the Phoenix, the gods of the sun and flame. A story of technology brought to humans; to myths of destruction and rebirth. To be immortal; to be a god; it is always a paradox of fire and technology. The morality of the fire is always in question but we desire it and fear it. And yet it has changed us, we have learned so much since we first touched fire. We used it to destroy the wood, smelt the metal and build the chip. And now we teach and show the fire what we know; what we create and our reflection is there telling us our faults. The GAN is but a single neuron in a blazing star; a greater fire is coming. 
One of 200 unique pieces of art in Painting With Fire: A History in GANs. Exploring the history of generative adversarial networks GAN as represented by fire.  https://bardionson.com/painting-with-fire
Pix2Pix - Phillip Isola, Jun-Yan Zhu, Tinghui Zhou, Alexei A. Efros Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks Nov 2016 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07005
Memo Akten Webcam Pix2Pix|May 2017|https://github.com/memo/webcam-pix2pix-tensorflow

Disney Fire

A singular light emerges, defining the space around it with a warm, focused intensity that speaks to the heart of a flames transient life.
Channeling the fire myths of the world, Prometheus, the Phoenix, the gods of the sun and flame. A story of technology brought to humans; to myths of destruction and rebirth. To be immortal; to be a god; it is always a paradox of fire and technology. The morality of the fire is always in question but we desire it and fear it. And yet it has changed us, we have learned so much since we first touched fire. We used it to destroy the wood, smelt the metal and build the chip. And now we teach and show the fire what we know; what we create and our reflection is there telling us our faults. The GAN is but a single neuron in a blazing star; a greater fire is coming. 
One of 200 unique pieces of art in Painting With Fire: A History in GANs. Exploring the history of generative adversarial networks GAN as represented by fire.  https://bardionson.com/painting-with-fire
BigGAN - Brock, Andrew; Donahue, Jeff; Simonyan, Karen. Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis. International Conference on Learning Representations 2019. arXiv:1809.11096. BigGAN, High-Resolution Image Generation:.
BigGAN - Brock, Andrew; Donahue, Jeff; Simonyan, Karen. Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis. International Conference on Learning Representations 2019. arXiv:1809.11096. BigGAN, High-Resolution Image Generation:.|Sept 2018|https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv180911096B

Match

A prediction of the future. Next frame prediction pushes GAN to the limit but forms strange dreams of increasing entropy.
Channeling the fire myths of the world, Prometheus, the Phoenix, the gods of the sun and flame. A story of technology brought to humans; to myths of destruction and rebirth. To be immortal; to be a god; it is always a paradox of fire and technology. The morality of the fire is always in question but we desire it and fear it. And yet it has changed us, we have learned so much since we first touched fire. We used it to destroy the wood, smelt the metal and build the chip. And now we teach and show the fire what we know; what we create and our reflection is there telling us our faults. The GAN is but a single neuron in a blazing star; a greater fire is coming. 
One of 200 unique pieces of art in Painting With Fire: A History in GANs. Exploring the history of generative adversarial networks GAN as represented by fire.  https://bardionson.com/painting-with-fire
Pix2Pix - Phillip Isola, Jun-Yan Zhu, Tinghui Zhou, Alexei A. Efros Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks Nov 2016 https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004
Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks Phillip Isola, Jun-Yan Zhu, Tinghui Zhou, Alexei A. Efros a significant development in image-to-image translation using conditional GANs. It showed how GANs could be used for tasks like turning sketches into photographs or day scenes into night scenes.|Nov 2018|https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.07004

Traveling Fire

Our signature commission awarded to world renowned photographers to help them create new work for the Obscura platform. 2 photographers per month are selected for their outstanding contributions to the medium of photography. We offer the artist a curation team to assist in the selection of the final pieces. Each artist will produce a collection of 55 NFTs.

55 Season Passes will be sold for the Curated Commission. Each pass guarantees 8 NFTs, one from every curated artist. Sold once per season.

purchase your season pass on the secondary market: https://opensea.io/collection/obscura-mint-pass or stay tuned for the season 2 primary sale at: http://obscura.io in May 2022

Obscura Curated

Subject Studies #26 by Tania Franco Klein

Subject Studies is an anthropological project on the perception of the subject inside
contextualized imagery. Repeatedly creating the same context for a scene to happen, the gaze
is now turned into how each spectator constructs their perception of the scene and the
characters on it from their own cultural gaze and personal history.

The various subjects recreate a similar character in the scenes they inhabit. A scene which
maintains the same essence in terms of visual qualities, framing , lighting, editing.

In a wider and general manner the way of describing one of the sequences could be for
example a person in a green bathroom. After that, it just gets complicated and complex as
vocabulary and perception change the atmosphere in which each person perceives the mood of
the scene differently depending on the subject in front of them.

We dont see things as they are, we see them as we are
attributed to the writer ANAS NIN

Edition: 1 of 1

Commissioned by Obscura

Subject Studies #26 by Tania Franco Klein

Post Photographic Perspectives is Fellowship's inaugural group show celebrating a new wave of innovation in photography.

Some questions that are always at the forefront of my art practice: how do my images relate to the images that precede and surround them; what expectations are we bringing to images, and how are these expectations established & reinforced; what purpose do these expectations serve and how can we interact with these expectations?

AI image generators are a fascinating new tool for exploring these questions because they create images based upon a dataset of hundreds of millions of preexisting imagery but are otherwise unfettered by the preexisting expectations of visual culture. That is, they make new images based on predictions from all the images (and image tags) that precede them. However, they are not otherwise bound by human logic or cultural codes and therefore make images that reflect these codes in surprising and often challenging ways, like a funhouse mirror.

Funhouse Mirror by Charlie Engman

Some questions that are always at the forefront of my art practice: how do my images relate to the images that precede and surround them; what expectations are we bringing to images, and how are these expectations established and reinforced; what purpose do these expectations serve and how can we interact with these expectations?
AI image generators are a fascinating new tool for exploring these questions because they create images based upon a dataset of hundreds of millions of preexisting imagery but are otherwise unfettered by the preexisting expectations of visual culture. That is, they make new images based on predictions from all the images (and image tags) that precede them. However, they are not otherwise bound by human logic or cultural codes and therefore make images that reflect these codes in surprising and often challenging ways, like a funhouse mirror. There is a beautiful collapse of category distinctions and a dynamic interplay between un-indoctrinated naivety and an appreciation of precedent.



 Year: 2023

Edition: NFT 1 of 1

Copyright:  2023 Charlie Engman. All Rights Reserved.

License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Funhouse Mirror #088

Funhouse Mirror #043

Funhouse Mirror #028

Funhouse Mirror #024

AI-Log by Alina Trifan

"AI-Log" is an immersive project that explores the realms of memory, place, and the allure of the apocalypse. Its genesis lies in a captivating dialogue between myself and AI, a journey of mutual understanding and shared perspectives.

The collection interweaves photographs sourced from various years and countries that I, as an immigrant, have called home. The resulting compositions resonate with a nostalgic undercurrent, evoking both the sentiments of bygone eras and the interconnections of our present reality. AI-Log unfurls like a diary, with entries that oscillate between personal anecdotes and contemplations on universal themes, notably the elusive nature of memory. Through this process, I have not only revisited past experiences but also forged new ones.

An unexpected facet of AI-Log manifests as a chronicle of events preceding the apocalypse. This element emerged organically during my interactions with AI, perhaps influenced by my state of mind or the melodies that serenaded me. While the imagery often alludes to disintegration and decay within nature, there remains an exaltation of beauty and a profound sense of curiosity for what may lie beyond. This sentiment is particularly palpable in the depictions of human figures who valiantly confront destruction with open arms.

To commence the creative process, I meticulously organized my extensive archive of photographs into categorized folders, considering factors such as year, location, subject matter (nature, people), and a particularly evocative folder entitled "Magic," housing images that exude a textural quality capable of imbuing the final compositions with an air of enchantment.

Guided by intuition and a desire to generate fresh narratives, I carefully selected pairs of photographs. Employing the capabilities of AI models, I harmoniously blended these visual counterparts, occasionally augmenting the process with textual prompts to achieve the desired outcome. After numerous iterations and variations, I amassed over 2000 images, each a testament to our collaborative journey.