Imagine for a moment that Hieronymus Bosch, the master of surrealism and Renaissance fantasy from the 15th century, came back to life and encountered these images generated through artificial intelligence Midjourney5.
How would he feel seeing his visions, once brought to life on canvas with brush and paint, recreated by a non-human entitay?
We can dream that Bosch would be astonished, his mind stirred by the turn of times. Perhaps he would contemplate these images with a mix of wonder and bewilderment, seeing his own genius reflected in a pixelated mirror. Art produced through means vastly different from his own, yet capturing something of the essence of his gaze.
In his astonishment, Bosch might find a strange beauty in this new medium, a beauty aligned with his own appreciation for the peculiar and unexpected. He would encounter his fantastic creatures, surreal landscapes, visions of good and evil, all reproduced with inhuman precision. But he would also see something more: a tribute to his legacy, a continuation of his work through means he could never have imagined.
I have been exploring generative art for over 8 years, and I feel that this is another step along the same path. Previously, the algorithms I used helped me create abstractions. Today, algorithms not only create abstractions but can generate whatever one can imagine, even the most extravagant visions of past artists. And though these images are artificially generated, they carry a kind of magic, an echo of the human art that inspired them.
If Bosch could see this, he might recognize that, even though the brush and canvas have been replaced by algorithms and code, the impulse to create, to explore, to astonish, remains unaltered. Technology and human creativity, together, have opened new doors in the art world, doors that allow us to connect with the great masters of the past in new and exciting ways.
