Artist creates software that paints portraits using a subject's online data
By Ian Steadman
Quantified Selfies
Leon Csernohlavek
This article was taken from the December 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Artist and computer scientist Sergio Albiac will be making art after his death. His painting software, Stardust, has learnt to imitate his technique -- and incorporate data about his subjects' lives. He calls it "a meaningful artistic representation of the quantified self".
For Stardust, Barcelona-based Albiac asked people to submit photos of themselves to his site, where they were turned into triptychs using images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
For his new project he's developed an app that tracks user activity -- everything from tweets and texts to calories -- in a form he can use for portraits where "any kind of information can be transformed into a visual representation". "Let's say you were in Brighton," he explains. "I grab photos of Brighton from the cloud and use those. Or you record everything for a month, and I do a portrait of that month." The program chooses Albiac-like strokes that also represent data. He breaks that process down into stages -- what he calls "sensing, selecting, translating and executing" the data for an artwork. He wants the audience to do the sensing and selecting, and the generative system to do the transforming and executing.
That opens up the possibility that the program could be making art that's attributed to him -- even when he's no longer around. "We don't have to share the same space, but all the components of creation are here -- my personal touch, your data, the program deciding how to transform it. It's not an Instagram filter."
This article was first published in the December 2013 issue of WIRED magazine
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