This article is part of the #30NFTArtists30days challenge, where I write a daily newsletter edition about a different digital artist during March 2022. If you haven’t subscribed, join +7,400 art fans by subscribing here:
During my master’s degree in data science, I took some courses on artificial intelligence and was stunned to learn the myriad of applications available. One day, one of my professors showed us techniques used to create art. At the time, I thought this was made just for fun but comprehended the potential of that particular avenue. After entering the metaverse and witnessing NFT art, I saw that fulfilled potential from artists applying similar techniques to those I learned during my studies. Today, I have the chance to present the work of Jenni Pasanen, one of those NFT artists pushing the boundaries between art and technology with her generative adversarial networks (GANs) creations.
Tell me a bit about your background?
My artistic journey started most likely the same way as many of us; first there was a pen, then there were walls to draw on and then there was an angry mother. Simply put; I've been creating for as long as I can remember. I've explored all kinds of techniques to find my style and calling; Acrylics, ink, clay, watercolor, markers, oils, pulp and the list goes on.
As computers became a thing in all households in the 2000s I started drawing digitally, first with a mouse and later on in my teens with Wacom. I studied graphic design in school and taught myself on the side to become an animator & motion designer. I worked as a designer and animator in branding and marketing for around seven years.
2. Do you have a particular creative process? Where do you get inspiration from?
The process of how I start creating works varies from what kind of piece I am creating. In most cases the piece starts with generating GAN images with ArtBreeder, it's my favorite app as it has very limited options, every image you generate is a complete surprise. For me GAN is a tool, it works both as a painting and inspiration for my pieces. We create our own reality from what we have lived, which leads us all to see different things when generating GAN pieces resembling very familiar but yet many unknown shapes, shades, and colors.
You could say my inspiration comes from everyday life, all the beauty and even horrors that can be seen and felt in this world. I take those GAN images that fired up something in me and combine them with digital painting.
For those of you who don’t have a technical background, GANs might be hard to grasp. In a nutshell, they are algorithmic architectures that use two neural networks, pitting one against the other (thus the “adversarial”) to generate new, synthetic instances of data that can pass for real data. In other words, they generate new outputs from a set of inputs. They are used widely in image generation, video generation, and voice generation.
GANs were introduced in a paper by Ian Goodfellow and other researchers at the University of Montreal, including Yoshua Bengio, in 2014.
Could you tell me the biggest challenge you have faced when using Artificial Intelligence techniques?
Probably time. As I love the limitations of the program, which lead every newly generated image to be a surprise, it can take sometimes days or even weeks to generate something that makes my heart race. There aren't enough hours in the day to sleep when you have the urge to create.
What are your future plans in the NFT world?
Ohh boy, where to begin! There are so many projects planned and ongoing, nine collaborations under construction, and more requests coming every week, there's so so much I want to try out and experiment with.
So excited about things yet to come! I won't be going anywhere, it's just beginning!
Don’t forget to follow Jenni on Twitter, so you don’t miss her upcoming collaborations!
Until next time,
- Kaloh
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