Gallery of 18 drawings and 18 AI-generated images.

Documentation

As of Monday Aug 28th, my performances for Vend Me! have been concluded at PC, and here are some fun photos of students next to the sculpture waiting for their drawings.

A lot of the reactions were generally positive (lots of happy laughs since most requests were humorous) or rather quiet (just a thanks since students tend to be busy!) Due to the public nature of the performance space, I kept to a few photos of students who gave permission to my assistant Sunny, rather than video documentation since campus requires that I believe-and I didn’t want to catch workers and others who did not want to be on camera.

The goal of each performance was to gather at least 5 drawings each day (I did a set of 3 two hour performances) on the Wednesday and Thursday, the week of August 13th, and the last one on August 28th.

Funny enough, I lost my voice chatting and trying to go over the volume of the music next door at the boba spot, despite the performance being not heavy on the vocals, I would still have to clarify that yes. there is a person in the box drawing for you, don’t leave yet!

If I were to repeat this project, hopefully in the future, as it was very enjoyable and out of my normal creative routine and boundaries, I would have a bigger budget for a nicer box and more varied locations ( I stayed in one location in Price Center and traffic could definitely be better!)

I had only gotten 5 drawings in the first session, another 4 the second session, and the last session had the most traffic!

I’m definitely looking forward to the zoom gallery showing and the physical one at Mandeville on Sept. 9th!

Work in Progress 7/30.

Some photos of my work in progress. This past Friday, I had the time to bring my materials to Room B114 where it’s being stored now. With a saw and some scissors, my partner helped cut out the shape for me to have a slot for the drawing requests and also a doorway in for me to get into the box so I can stand/sit inside of it during the performances.

As of now, I am still waiting on Professor and Price Center’s permission to hold my performances for a few hours and few days in the second part of the class sequence.

An obstacle I didn’t think much about earlier in my project planning was the fact I need to hand-paint stuff. I was originally going to use some spray paint I’d found in a random classroom and I used both cans up SO fast, luckily I did get a base down and also had white paint, but those tubes were also small. I will order more paint.

So back to square one with painting. I just need to tidy up the paint and finish the other two sides, and also attach a notebook and pen to the outside so folks can make requests. I also happened to find some beautiful blue reflective sticker paper that I can use for the slot to make it look a little more nice-looking.

I just want to make the vending machine look a little less “cardboard box” and more speculative and intentional in its design. I think the coats of white paint will help. It doesn’t need to be too fancy but also needs to look nice because this is my senior project. :D I like how off-putting and ominous the gray and white paint looks. but it’s too uneven. More work to be done this week!

Influences.

I have a few inspirations and moodboards behind my senior project, which I will include here for reference :)

This moodboard includes some more speculative design ideas (I wanted to make my vending machine with acquired or recycled items like cardboard and found materials on campus since my project has a lower budget.) I was also inspired by this beautiful charity vending machine service with a person inside it selling flowers, as well as the aesthetic qualities between human-generated works vs AI.

I was also inspired by a recent encounter with an artist I met on campus, Jakob Saloner who has this lovely interview and portrait drawing project, where he finds strangers and sits them for a live portrait and asks them fun life questions.

Glaze, used by artists to help protect their online works, is also highly inspirational to me as it was recently developed by a group of students and professors that are passionate about protecting artists’ rights. Glaze lowers the quality of an image almost negligibly and makes it more difficult for programs to analyze stylistic markers and to read and recognize patterns in images.

I was also very inspired by the recent controversy with the late Kim Jung Gi, (one of my most favorite freehand illustrators, a master in his craft) where not too long after he passed away, a French developer fed all of his life’s works so that AI can replicate his style. I found this particularly disheartening because of his death, he did not necessarily give consent for such a project and I’m sure that this is not really something that he aspired to live for-he always seemed to me someone who advocated for the idea that anyone can learn to draw with enough practice and discipline.

Vend Me.

A little about the concept of my final project:

Vend Me, if you please! Welcome to the first portable generative AI printing vending machine. Simply write down your idea for an artwork, and within 2 minutes, a finished work spawns like magic.

Our generative AI artist is programmed into this machine with a data set that it is still being trained on. Don’t worry about how long they’ve been inside there. Don’t look in the box.

No longer do you need to wait on a commissioned artist, get your ideas down RIGHT NOW. Get instant gratification.

My project, Vend Me! is very much inspired by strange vending machines around the world, such as this weird dystopian Russian vending machine that is selling likes and follows for influencers, and this other ATM machine for fresh Norwegian Salmon, because who wouldn’t want fish from a machine?

Except, my cardboard box I mean vending machine is speculative design in the sense I am acting as an artist inside a “generative AI” machine of the future, where consumers can demand art of whatever prompt they so write and choose, not so different from how prompts are engineered with multiple different tags and descriptors of different artist styles mashed together, and different source images from artists (often without consent.)

It feels good to be back on Tumblr.

I sure missed it here.