Tony Yanick
Tony Yanick's BOBBI LYNN is a reflection on the artist's mother as his role model, an abstract meditation on aspiration and imitation. The shifting, hallucinogenic imagery is composed using a GAN, a generative adversarial network, which pairs AI neural networks – or 'deep learning algorithms' – against one another, that the two can be trained without human supervision. GANs are often compared to mimicry in evolutionary biology, with one thing (an AI) appearing as something else (a photograph, perhaps). The AI models itself on an aspirant object, much like a young child imitates their role model, imperfectly and diligently. Set to a soundtrack titled In Search of Our Father's Gardens by RA Washington/Jah Nada, Yanick's video – however provisional – gestures to the creative act: biological, digital, and artistic.
The generative open-license model credited with co-creating this work is Stable Diffusion.
A multi-valent practitioner, Tony Yanick, works at the intersection of philosophy, technology, and art. Attending to the intricacies of aesthetics and ethics in the age of artificial intelligence, he finds variable modes to present his understandings. To Yanick, art is less a final form than a means of integrated research, a tool with which to articulate his findings beyond the written word.
