Latest news with #MarkRothko
The Verge
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
What happens when you feed AI nothing
If you stumbled across Terence Broad's AI-generated artwork (un)stable equilibrium on YouTube, you might assume he'd trained a model on the works of the painter Mark Rothko — the earlier, lighter pieces, before his vision became darker and suffused with doom. Like early-period Rothko, Broad's AI-generated images consist of simple fields of pure color, but they're morphing, continuously changing form and hue. But Broad didn't train his AI on Rothko; he didn't train it on any data at all. By hacking a neural network, and locking elements of it into a recursive loop, he was able to induce this AI into producing images without any training data at all — no inputs, no influences. Depending on your perspective, Broad's art is either a pioneering display of pure artificial creativity, a look into the very soul of AI, or a clever but meaningless electronic by-product, closer to guitar feedback than music. In any case, his work points the way toward a more creative and ethical use of generative AI beyond the large-scale manufacture of derivative slop now oozing through our visual culture. Broad has deep reservations about the ethics of training generative AI on other people's work, but his main inspiration for (un)stable equilibrium wasn't philosophical; it was a crappy job. In 2016, after searching for a job in machine learning that didn't involve surveillance, Broad found employment at a firm that ran a network of traffic cameras in the city of Milton Keynes, with an emphasis on data privacy. 'My job was training these models and managing these huge datasets, like 150,000 images all around the most boring city in the UK,' says Broad. 'And I just got so sick of managing datasets. When I started my art practice, I was like, I'm not doing it — I'm not making [datasets].' Legal threats from a multinational corporation pushed him further away from inputs. One of Broad's early artistic successes involved training a type of artificial neural network called an autoencoder on every frame of the film Blade Runner (1982), and then asking it to generate a copy of the film. The result, bits of which are still available online, are simultaneously a demonstration of the limitations, circa 2016, of generative AI, and a wry commentary on the perils of human-created intelligence. Broad posted the video online, where it soon received major attention — and a DMCA takedown notice from Warner Bros. 'Whenever you get a DMCA takedown, you can contest it,' Broad says. 'But then you make yourself liable to be sued in an American court, which, as a new graduate with lots of debt, was not something I was willing to risk.' When a journalist from Vox contacted Warner Bros. for comment, it quickly rescinded the notice — only to reissue it soon after. (Broad says the video has been reposted several times, and always receives a takedown notice — a process that, ironically, is largely conducted via AI.) Curators began to contact Broad, and he soon got exhibitions at the Whitney, the Barbican, Ars Electronica, and other venues. But anxiety over the work's murky legal status was crushing. 'I remember when I went over to the private view of the show at the Whitney, and I remember being sat on a plane and I was shitting myself because I was like, O h, Warner Bros. are going to shut it down,' Broad recalls. 'I was super paranoid about it. Thankfully, I never got sued by Warner Bros., but that was something that really stuck with me. After that, I was like, I want to practice, but I don't want to be making work that's just derived off other people's work without their consent, without paying them. Since 2016, I've not trained a sort of generative AI model on anyone else's data to make my art.' In 2018, Broad started a PhD in computer science at Goldsmiths, University of London. It was there, he says, that he started grappling with the full implications of his vow of data abstinence. 'How could you train a generative AI model without imitating data? It took me a while to realize that that was an oxymoron. A generative model is just a statistical model of data that just imitates the data it's been trained on. So I kind of had to find other ways of framing the question.' Broad soon turned his attention to the generative adversarial network, or GAN, an AI model that was then much in vogue. In a conventional GAN, two neural networks — the discriminator and the generator — combine to train each other. Both networks analyze a dataset, and then the generator attempts to fool the discriminator by generating fake data; when it fails, it adjusts its parameters, and when it succeeds, the discriminator adjusts. At the end of this training process, tug-of-war between discriminator and generator will, theoretically, produce an ideal equilibrium that enables this GAN to produce data that's on par with the original training set. Broad's eureka moment was an intuition that he could replace the training data in the GAN with another generator network, loop it to the first generator network, and direct them to imitate each other. His early efforts led to mode collapse and produced 'gray blobs; nothing exciting,' says Broad. But when he inserted a color variance loss term into the system, the images became more complex, more vibrant. Subsequent experiments with the internal elements of the GAN pushed the work even further. 'The input to [a GAN] is called a latent vector. It's basically a big number array,' says Broad. 'And you can kind of smoothly transition between different points in the possibility space of generation, kind of moving around the possibility space of the two networks. And I think one of the interesting things is how it could just sort of infinitely generate new things.' Looking at his initial results, the Rothko comparison was immediately apparent; Broad says he saved those first images in a folder titled 'Rothko-esque.' (Broad also says that when he presented the works that comprise (un)stable equilibrium at a tech conference, someone in the audience angrily called him a liar when he said he hadn't input any data into the GAN, and insisted that he must've trained it on color field paintings.) But the comparison sort of misses the point; the brilliance in Broad's work resides in the process, not the output. He didn't set out to create Rothko-esque images; he set out to uncover the latent creativity of the networks he was working with. Did he succeed? Even Broad's not entirely sure. When asked if the images in (un)stable equilibrium are the genuine product of a 'pure' artificial creativity, he says, 'No external representation or feature is imposed on the networks outputs per se, but I have speculated that my personal aesthetic preferences have had some influence on this process as a form of 'meta-heuristic.' I also think why it outputs what it does is a bit of a mystery. I've had lots of academics suggest I try to investigate and understand why it outputs what it does, but to be honest I am quite happy with the mystery of it!' Talking to him about his process, and reading through his PhD thesis, one of the takeaways is that, even at the highest academic level, people don't really understand exactly how generative AI works. Compare generative AI tools like Midjourney, with their exclusive emphasis on 'prompt engineering,' to something like Photoshop, which allows users to adjust a nearly endless number of settings and elements. We know that if we feed generative AI data, a composite of those inputs will come out the other side, but no one really knows, on a granular level, what's happening inside the black box. (Some of this is intentional; Broad notes the irony of a company called OpenAI being highly secretive about its models and inputs.) Broad's explorations of inputless output shed some light on the internal processes of AI, even if his efforts sometimes sound more like early lobotomists rooting around in the brain with an ice pick rather than the subtler explorations of, say, psychoanalysis. Revealing how these models work also demystifies them — critical at a time when techno-optimists and doomers alike are laboring under what Broad calls 'bullshit,' the 'mirage' of an all-powerful, quasi-mystical AI. 'We think that they're doing far more than they are,' says Broad. 'But it's just a bunch of matrix multiplications. It's very easy to get in there and start changing things.'
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stop rushing through art galleries. Spend 10 minutes with just one masterpiece instead
On a recent Sunday afternoon, with a few hours up my sleeve, I decided: I want to see a Rothko. I wasn't in the mood to wander around the gallery, spending a couple of minutes with hundreds of pieces of art. I just wanted to find the Rothko at the National Gallery of Victoria, stand in front of it for 10 minutes, and then go outside again to enjoy the sunshine. We're extraordinarily lucky in Australia that the permanent collections at our state galleries are free to attend. Our public collections are just that: owned by the public, belonging to us, there for us to enjoy. When I was growing up, the Art Gallery of South Australia's kids program had a sort of hidden picture game where you had to find objects in various paintings around the gallery. More than anything, that program taught me that the gallery space was open to me. As an adult, I love a day planned around the gallery, and I can spend hours with the collection. I'll visit the same exhibitions again and again, noticing new paintings every time – or new things in paintings I've spent hours with previously. But there is beauty in building a visit around one work of art: popping your head into the gallery during your spare half-an-hour, to spend some time with an old friend. Mark Rothko is best known for his colour field paintings, large-scale canvases, swathed with colour. In these expanses of hues, Rothko somehow manages to capture the depths of our emotional worlds. The Rothko at the NGV is titled Untitled (Red), and was painted in 1956. The wall text features one of my favourite quotes from the artist about his work: 'I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on.' Standing in front of it during my recent visit, I found myself dwarfed by the painting. A thin dusky red barely obscures the canvas. Three squares of colour sit on top: a rich blood red, a light rose pink, and a terracotta orange. I stood close enough that it took up my whole field of vision; I stood back to take it all in at once. A few people wandered in and out of the room – in and out of my awareness – but I just stood there, quietly contemplating my emotions. A sense of peace, calm. Happiness researcher Arthur Brooks says that when you look at art, 'your perception of the outside world expands'. It unlocks what Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman calls our panoramic vision, where the gaze relaxes and widens to take in the peripheries. It is the opposite of the stress response, where our pupils constrict and our field of vision narrows. Art opens us up to the world. I think about this panoramic vision when I visit the Rothko; as I have many times in many galleries in front of many works of art. When you stop in front of one piece, you allow everything to slow down. It can feel like you're being subsumed, or embraced. Everything else fades away. You can exist fully in the moment: just you, and this work of art. I have my favourites at other galleries around the country. On a work trip to Canberra, I visited the Skyspace installation Within, Without (2010) by James Turrell at the National Gallery of Australia every sunset. The day John Olsen died I went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to stand in front of his incredible painting Five Bells (1963). I'm always overwhelmed by the intelligence in the seeming simplicity of Emily Kam Kngwarray's Awelye II (1994) and Awelye V (1994) paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia. I love the way different art works take over the Watermall at the Queensland Art Gallery, the water changing the shape of the art, as the art changes the shape of the water feature. I have only ever been to Perth in the height of summer, and so Mr Ngarralja Tommy Way's Warla, Flat Country (2021), which brings the heat of the desert into the gallery, is the work I most remember from my time at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Not every trip to the art gallery needs to be a huge outing. What a privilege – and a joy – it is to just go and spend whatever time you have to hand with one work of art. A painting, a sculpture, a video piece. Our public collections belong to us: we should remind ourselves of this by stopping by, even for 10 minutes, as often as we can.
Daily Mail
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Red (2019 stage production): Trailer, certificate and where to watch
Alfred Molina stars as US painter Mark Rothko in a filmed version of the stage play 2019
Chicago Tribune
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: AC/DC and the underrated art of doing the same thing forever
Angus Young, the AC/DC guitarist who still dresses in the round cap and short pants of an Australian schoolboy (despite turning 70 in March), once gave an amazing response to a frequent criticism about his band: People say AC/DC, founded in Sydney in 1973 (and playing a sold-out show at Soldier Field on Saturday), have been making the same album, and writing the same song, , for the past 52 years. Since 1975, they've made 17 studio albums and every single one, to the non-metal head, casual listener and plenty of fans, sounds just like every other one. So sometime in the '80s, when they still had only a dozen records, Young told a reporter he was 'sick to death' of critics who say they have made 11 albums 'that sound exactly the same — in fact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.' That's the healthiest thing a metal band ever said. There's freedom, and a profound understanding of craft, in repetition. I admire artists who do one thing again and again with little variety, sidling up to a proverbial lunch counter and proudly ordering the same sandwich every day without deliberation. I don't mean the Warhols of the world espousing commodification, and or someone like Martin Scorsese who merely made a lot of gangster films. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean — artists who repeat, and repeat, and repeat. There may be variation in there, but that would only be evident to a connoisseur. Also, I don't include the cynical artist who recycles endlessly without intending to repeat. Mark Rothko, the great abstract painter who made countless 'color fields' that could be described as soft hues arranged into blurry rectangles, arranged rectangles in many ways. But what's moving about Rothko's rectangles is the commitment. He died three years before AC/DC formed. He had more of a thing for Schubert than Australian metal. But if they found themselves at the same table at a wedding, Angus Young and Mark Rothko could have bonded. That sounds like a cool table. Also seated there is the Ramones — whose shows were one 60-minute punk squall broken by shouts of Since this is a large table (please don't ask who the Ramones, Mark Rothko and AC/DC would know in common to be invited to the same wedding), seat Agatha Christie there, too. Picking over their rubbery chickens, they'd recognize a shared philosophy: Insanity is not always doing one thing over and over, and expecting different results. Doing one thing can mean refinement, even appreciation. Christie likely wrote at least one mystery without a dead body in a train, steamship, boarding school or coastal mansion, without the usual suspects or a tweedy inspector, but I don't want to read it. She was so devoted to one thing, for 50 years, that reading enough Christie and identifying the mechanics that make it all interesting, and not the killer, is the fun part. These are one-track minds. These are artists who rarely wander, and somehow both artist and audience never seem to care. Adoringly so. To say both like a good formula doesn't capture this intense bond. You get a feeling both parties are tucked beneath a warm blanket. There's no more disappointment here than realizing that waves keep coming, and coming. Knowing that behind every swell is always another is soothing. But when is it just lazy? My mind immediately goes to decades of 'Friday the 13th' movies in which a masked killer hunts countless variations of the same teenagers in the first movie, only allowing for a tweak here or there: killer in 3D, killer in New York City, killer in space. Why are those lifeless while, say, the latest Steven Soderbergh crime movie 'Black Bag,' as effortless and familiar as any Soderbergh crime flick from two decades ago, is still satisfying? Because Soderbergh is playing variations on a theme, a style or a structure, appearing to surprise himself that he can stretch it as far as he does. As serial killer franchises go (and there are good ones), the 'Friday the 13th' franchise was never that curious about itself. Comparatively, AC/DC, which nobody would accuse of being curious, can still get your blood surging because they still locate something exciting in two chords. At that wedding table, I imagine Young pulls out his cell phone and Christie peeks over and notices that his home screen is one of Monet's countless haystacks, and she smiles knowingly. An artist who repeats over and over again and rarely bores is the artist who is always seeing, unwilling to move on until they explore an idea completely — maybe for a lifetime. It's as if they have been locked into a long conversation with the idea itself. Pick up nearly any big multi-disc jazz reissue and you hear this playing out in real time, with the same musicians picking over one or two songs again and again, sometimes with inaudible differences. Jim Nutt, the Chicago Imagist, now 86, made so many paintings of female heads, it's like its own genre. Woody Allen, for years on end, seemed to shoot the same movie about the same characters having the same tics in the same city (New York City), you could have been fooled into thinking he was the most well-adjusted filmmaker ever. Part of the genius of blues and country artists is in the million ways they say only a few things. There's a new Lana Del Rey song with a funny line warily bemoaning: 'All these country singers / And their lonely rides to Houston.' Part of the joke is that Lana Del Rey herself is the AC/DC of contemporary pop stars — thrillingly so. is her thing. Some might say her only thing. Her songs rarely go beyond a light gallup, her tone is always breathy and lush. My daughter groans whenever I ask Siri to play Lana; it's like I'm calling up the same song once again. Yet I don't hear any boredom in Lana Del Rey's sound. She is so thoroughly exploring the limits of contemporary ballads, you hang on every digression or alteration — a fast electronic hiccup, a touch of Ennio Morricone twang. The other day, I was talking to Chicago artist Theaster Gates and asked why he repeats himself so often, especially with his pottery. He mentioned growing up in a Baptist church where the pastor would riff on a single Bible verse for hours. He thinks of his own repetition as meditating on a single thought, or like a marker he carries through life: the Pledge of Allegiance, he said, means one thing when you're 6, but something else when you're 16, and another thing entirely if you fight in a war. We put a premium on artists who can't sit still, who show endless range and seem to switch hit every time at bat. David Bowie, for instance, is our contemporary ideal of an artist who refused to rest on laurels and do one thing well. Bowie, like Prince, like Bob Dylan, gravitated to change with an almost evolutionary fear — if you don't adapt, eventually you become irrelevant and get eaten. But the artist who repeats obsessively leans into a different truism: If every work of art is made up of only a handful of fresh thoughts, then what matters is . Every R.L. Stine 'Goosebumps' book is only slightly different than any other. Characters in novels by Haruki Murakami — who refers to his own repetition as meditation — make a lot of omelettes and listen to a lot of jazz. John Irving's characters get visited by bears. Alfred Hitchcock — who once remade his own film ('The Man Who Knew Too Much') — never met a mistaken identity he wouldn't explore. Elin Hilderbrand likes unease in paradise. John Carpenter has made too many variations on 'Rio Bravo' to count. I have never been able to distinguish between Jackson Pollock's splatters. The amazing Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, an extension of the Kohler Arts Center, is several floors of psychosis and artists who, oh, decide to paint only skulls or sculpt clay into only religious figures. I love that, not despite the predictability but of it. I insist I want variety in everything — eating, visiting, etc. — and yet one of the best feelings is seeing a well-trodden trail in a dense forest. Plenty of consumer studies bear this out: We say we long for new experiences but don't mind the same thing again and again. If you love something enough, you tend to change alongside it; if you're lucky, you notice those changes every time you return. AC/DC only ever sounds like AC/DC, and in a world being upended, that's a form of life insurance. Listening to their early stuff now, I hear cave men with guitars, but with the newer songs, rock stars with private jets, though really it's one long thump and always should be. Crunch, thump, hell, blood, thump, back in black, high voltage, crunch, live wire, thump, let there be rock — . For those about to rock, I salute you.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Child accidentally damages $50 million Rothko at Dutch museum
A Mark Rothko painting thought to be worth tens of millions of dollars is undergoing restoration after a child accidentally damaged the artwork at a museum in the Netherlands. 'Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8' sustained some visible scratches when a child brushed against the abstract painting at the Depot, a public storage area of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In the Depot, much of the art is displayed similarly to how it would in a gallery without traditional exhibition protections. The Depot is currently showing highlights of its vast collection as the main museum undergoes renovations. 'It happened because a child, in an unsupervised moment, touched the lower part of the work. There was no intent. This was not vandalism,' museum spokesperson Vincent Cardinaal told ABC News. The painting has since been moved to the museum's conservation lab. Cardinaal said the restoration process was expected to be successful and that the painting would be able to be displayed in the future. The museum did not release images of the damage, further description or estimates of repair costs. A vandal who wrote on another Rothko piece at the Tate Modern in London caused about $250,000 in damages that cost 18 months to repair. 'Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8' has never been auctioned but it's estimated to be worth between $50 and $60 million. 'Untitled, 1968' — another of Rothko's 'color field' paintings — sold for $23.9 million at Sotheby's in 2023. The Dutch museum acquired the piece in 1970 after Rothko's death. _____
