Conference and Generative Art & Wine Charity Exhibition
MakersPlace is proud to partner with Fundación Alma Gil on the inaugural Digital Art Day Malaga at the world famous Carmen Thyssen Museum.
The Digital Art Day is a one-day conference taking place on September 13, 2024, featuring a series of insightful talks about digital art, with a particular focus on generative art and AI. Speakers include renowned artists such as Operator, Zancan, Fingacode and many more as well as industry experts such as ArtMeta founder Georg Bak and MoMA CTO Diana Pan. MakersPlace curator Eleonora Brizi will be moderating a panel focused on AI Art – Past, Present and Future.
Generative Art & Wine Charitable Sale
Nine artists have each been invited to create a “generative wine collection,” a series of unique artworks dedicated to the vision of wine. The artists include Ana María Caballero, Anna Carreras, Fingacode, Iskra Velitchkova, Ivona Tau, Look Highward, Marcelo Soria Rodriguez, Qian Qian, and Soliman Lopez.
Each digital artwork will be sold along with a physical bottle of wine with the label — representing the same digital artwork — hand-signed by the artist.
The wines have been meticulously crafted by Bodegas Alma Gil exclusively for the charitable sale, with the utmost attention to the selection process and the blending varieties to create an exquisite quality product.
Each series consists of 78 artworks, of which 48 will be made available for sale to the public on September 12, 2024 on MakersPlace. Thirty artworks will be set aside for the artists and donors. The charitable sale will raise funds to support the growth and development of up-and-coming artists worldwide who dedicate their calling to the digital space with 90% of all proceeds to be shared among artists, Fundación Alma Gil, and Carmen Thyssen Museum.
To learn more about Digital Art Day and to RSVP, please visit digitalartday.xyz
About the Series
Signature Labels by Ana María Caballero
Every time Ana María Caballero dedicates one of her books to its future reader, she honors their role in bringing literature to life. Signature Labels transforms this reverence into analog generative art.
The first page of each of her six books has been converted into a wine label, which Caballero hand-signed in a unique way, leaving space for the collector to insert their name, personalizing the dedication. This collaborative element adds a layer of generativity to the final label or artwork. It also allows for the possibility that the bottle will be gifted to another person, whose name the collector may incorporate into the label, acknowledging the long tradition of offering wine as a gift.
Signature Labels reveals how the act of signing ennobles an object, bestowing a book or an artwork with a powerful intention that spills beyond the bounds of the thing itself.
Gotim a Gotim by Anna Carreras
Gotim a Gotim is a collection that encapsulates with abstract forms (drop by drop) the essence of our soil and landscape, culture, and traditions as a bottle encapsulates its essence distilled into wine. It portrays the grapes (‘gotims’) as a lens, brilliantly dispersing the flavors and light of the landscape, transforming them into rays of color and tasteful reflections with a unique geometrical explosion.
Spinnin’ Circles by Fingacode
In the heart of Spinnin’ lies the alchemy of simplicity and complexity, where the essence of creation is distilled from a single, unassuming circle. Much like the transformation of a humble grape into a rich and intricate wine, this gen algorithm takes a basic geometric shape and spins it through a generative dance, yielding artworks that pulse with life and vibrancy. This is a celebration of the beauty of the fundamentals, showcasing how the simplest elements, when touched by creativity, can blossom into works of profound depth and elegance. Here, the circle is not just a shape; it is the seed from which art springs forth, a reminder of the extraordinary within the ordinary.
Permitete by Iskra Velitchkova
“I have created this collection with the idea of liberating ourselves to experience this beautiful feeling of just being free to sketch hypothetical (or not hypothetical) future lives once we open a good bottle of wine, alone or sharing a table with loved ones.”
Apparatus Vitis by Ivona Tau
Exploration of the Vitis Vinifera plant forms (the common grape vine) with generative adversarial networks. The artificial variations blend colors and shapes without the limitations of earthly rules.
Cathedrales Irreales by Look Highward
Catedrales Irreales is a collection of imagined sacred spaces which seek to explore the nature of human numinous experience through the reinterpretive lens of AI.
Seeking to harness AI’s power to learn from and reference the depths of human culture and experience whilst embracing it a tool for reinterpretation and generative creation, Catedrales Irreales draws on the world’s rich and diverse cultures, architectural forms, and histories in a way that is intended as respectful, playful and creative.
This work seeks out what may be universal to the human experience of the numinous whilst honoring and reflecting the deep, unique, and endlessly fascinating strands of humanity’s history and many and varied cultures which get reflected and refracted in an AI lens.
The intention of this work is respectful, benevolent and representative of a belief that the strength of our humanity and of our higher selves lies in recognizing and respecting what we share universally as humans but express uniquely in each of our own rich and cultural roots and diversity. Any resemblance to actual events, belief systems, locales, persons, divine beings or gods, living, dead or immortal, is entirely coincidental.
Palabras y todo lo demás by Marcelo Soria Rodriguez
Palabras y todo lo demás (Words and everything else) is a little tribute to chatting, conversations, sharing stories, fears, celebrations, debate and everything else that contributes to human progress or expresses human life in all its diversity. It employs a reduced set of visual elements (women, men, cats, words / letters / scribbles, wine bottles) to metaphorically represent all sorts of communication.
Text/words are a very important element, as textual communication has typically a prominent role. Words are distorted into scribbles at times, a sign of other forms of communication, of playfulness. People as the actors of human stories, cats as nature that accompanies us. Wine as a symbol for any element around which conversations unfold.
The metaphor of “wine label” was used prompting the AI models as a base to lay these stories: as a result, poster-like images appear, and other less-structured images, bordering at times full-blown celebrations. Four AI models have been trained on previous generative work by the artist as well as on child drawings (the artist’s daughters): machine outputs that explore the world through randomness, human outputs that explore the same through early clean minds, unbiased. The combination of which explores, again metaphorically, the latent space of human ways of sharing and learning.
UVAs by Qian Qian
UVAs is a graphic composition system inspired by grape clusters. Using 10 color pixels as fundamental elements, 100 unique compositions are generated using 1 to 10 pixels each time.
Vitis Vinifera by Soliman Lopez
Vitis Vinifera is the scientific name given to the commonly known grapevine, the most common and cultivated climbing plant in the world used to make wine. The artwork uses parts of the genetic sequence of this plant to, through a Python code, generate a pixel pattern that corresponds with the selected DNA sequence, in this case of chromosome number 1 of the mentioned plant. The result is an abstract image that aims to simulate a pattern of a wine texture, or what we could call a digitized wine.
The image has been created with 7789 characters of the sequence (ACTG). The artwork, computer-generated, has almost infinite possibilities by selecting different sections of the Vitis Vinifera genetic code.
About the Artists
Ana María Caballero
Ana María Caballero is a multiple award-winning, multidisciplinary artist. Her work explores how biology delimits societal and cultural rites, ripping the veil from romanticized motherhood and questioning notions that package sacrifice as a virtue.
Ana is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Beverly International Literature Prize, Colombia’s José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize, the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, a Future Art Writers Award and a Sevens Foundation Grant. She’s the first living poet to sell a poem in the history of Sotheby’s.
Recognized as a digital poetry pioneer, her work has been featured by Poets.org, Poets & Writers, El País, nominated for a MAXXI BVLGARI Prize, shortlisted for a Lumen Prize, and been a finalist for the Vassar Miller Prize and exhibited in museums, galleries and public spaces worldwide.
The author of six books, she’s also the co-founder of digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse.
Anna Carreras
Anna Carreras (Barcelona, 1979) is a creative coder and digital artist interested in experimentation on interactive communication focusing her work on the use of generative algorithms, creative code, and interactive technology as a means of communication and an experience generator.
She is interested in complexity that emerges from small simple behaviors, from the balance between order and chaos. She tries to capture the diversity and richness of complexity working with generative algorithms and visuals.
She develops interactive installations to explore new emerging narratives encouraging the audience to participate and promoting their collaboration. Interaction adds the human diverse behavior to the experience fostering richer outcomes.
She holds two MSc degrees, one in Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) and another in Audiovisual Technologies from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).
She teaches creative coding in several Design Schools in Barcelona.
Fingacode
Fingacode is a multidisciplinary creative with an interest in audio-visual and interactive technologies. Born in Cameroon and now living in the United Kingdom, fingacode is a software engineer who has been experimenting with creative technologies for the past ten years, with works exhibited and sold by notable galleries including Christie’s, UnitLondon, BrightMoments, PROOF.xyz and VerticalCryptoArt.
Iskra Velitchkova
Iskra Velitchkova combines art and technology as a computational artist, creating both digital and physical works. With a strong background in Data Visualization, philosophy of technology, and strategy, she has advised various teams and projects over the years. However, she came to realize that questions are often more intriguing than answers, in both technology and life. This realization, along with her continuous pursuit of beauty, led her to fully commit to art.
Technology plays a central role in Iskra’s creative process, offering endless possibilities for new ideas and self-exploration. She uses generative methods to explore the relationship between nature and intention through algorithms and randomness. Her main focus is to understand whether technology can answer human questions.
She has exhibited internationally in cities such as London, Paris, Milan, New York, Miami, Singapore, Mexico City, and Berlin, collaborating with notable galleries like Kate Vass, Bright Moments, Feral File, and Unit London, as well as at renowned art fairs like Art Basel. Her work has been auctioned twice at Sotheby’s NY and at Christie’s NY in collaboration with Gucci.
Ivona Tau
Dr. Ivona Tau is a generative A.I. artist from Vilnius, Lithuania, who works with neural networks and code as a medium in experimental photography and motion painting. Her goal is to find and evoke emotions through artificially intelligent tools. She creates universally relatable memories by transforming her experiences captured on analog and digital film through generative neural networks (GAN).
Tau comes from the intersection of arts and technology, with 15 years of combined experience in professional photography and A.I. research. She was awarded the best award in the Digital Ars 2020 contest for art created with AI, the Computer Animation category award in Computer Space International Computer Art Forum 2021, and elected as one of the TOP 10 Women in AI 2022 by the Women in Tech Foundation.
Tau’s work has been exhibited widely, including Art Basel Miami Beach, SCOPE, CAFA, Art Week Shenzhen, Vellum, Bitforms New York, Venus Over Manhattan, The House of Fine Art, Bright Moments Berlin, Christie’s New York and Sotheby’s New York.
Her work has been acquired by ZMK Museum of Contemporary Art in Germany & Francisco Carolinum Linz in Austria.
Ivona Tau is active in the research community and holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology. She published multiple scientific papers in the field of Computer Vision and Artificial Neural Networks.
Look Highward
Look Highward is an artist working with machine learning, blockchain, and poetry. Exploring human meaning through the mind’s eye of the machine. Glitch and imperfection are welcomed in his work as intrinsic to beauty and to an openhearted exploration of the medium.
Look’s earliest work on-chain is a series of 1/1 AI video hallucinations of poetry, song and philosophy, minted and sold in 2021.
Possibility Spaces is Look’s first major collection and was released in August 2023. A collection of super-resolution artworks made in an emergent process of call and response between artist and AI, these vast detailed compositions reach up to 250 million pixels each in size.
Exhibited in Chicago, Paris, Brussels, São Paulo, and now Málaga.
Marcelo Soria Rodriguez
Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez is an artist and strategist based in Madrid, Spain. Interested in the relationships that span any combination of humans and machines, the role of emotions and questioning established societal & cultural notions in the light of potential new intelligent species entering into our environment. His work has been shown at Art Singapore, Art Basel Hong Kong, Unit London and Kate Vass Galerie among other places; he has been part of the Bright Moments México City and Finale collections, Art Blocks Curated Series 6 and published Contrapuntos, one of the highest acclaimed works on Tezos/fxhash.
He co-founded Databeers, a data literacy informal movement present in over 30 cities in 10 countries at its peak. He has a background in engineering, innovation, strategy and fostering education.
Qian Qian
Qian Qian is an artist and graphic designer based in New York. Currently the creative director of Bright Moments gallery, and artist of CryptoCitizens NFT collection.
Qian has 20 years of experience working in advertising and design, creating award-winning work for Samsung, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Google. His work has been exhibited in Victoria & Albert Museum, and Lincoln Center, as well as featured by Apple.
Soliman Lopez
Solimán López is a contemporary artist specialised in art, science, sociology and technology. He’s a founder of the Harddiskmuseum, OLEA biotoken and Manifesto Terricola movement, Innovation director at ESAT (Escuela Superior de Arte y Tecnología in Valencia, Spain) and Artist in research in Pole Da Vinci, Paris, France, his artistic practice includes work with artificial intelligence, biotechnology and DNA, electronics, interactive and 3D.
His work has been exhibited internationally at events, art centres and museums including OI Futuro – Biennial of Digital Art in Brazil in two occasions, ZKM Karlsruhe (Germany), the Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Centre Pompidou (France), Hermitage Saint Petersburg (Russia), Art Center Nabi-ISEA19 (South Korea), and many more.
Solimán also gives workshops and talks at universities, congresses and symposiums such as UFSM in Brazil, the University Carlos III in Madrid, the Google Campus in Madrid, the UPV in Valencia, the Bancaja Fundación, the Injuve, TEDx Valladolid, the Universidad de Cuenca, the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, MediaLab Prado, Madrid or Technarte Bilbao, Paris College of Art or Royal College London, as example.
For updates on all of our upcoming editorial features and artist interviews, subscribe to our newsletter below.
