A few weeks ago, our Founder, Dawn Walter, had the idea of commissioning a piece of art for the 2021 theme page on the Summit website. She wanted something that would highlight some of the key themes we’re exploring this year, so she asked Creative Technologist and artist Kerry Harrison to get involved.

The piece called ‘Intersection’ was created with a combination of machine learning and handmade techniques, which encapsulates the human-tech relationships we’re exploring as part of the Summit.

Kerry explains the process of creating the piece here…

“I wanted to create a piece that celebrated the intersection of humans and technology. Very often we see an output from a machine learning model, but don’t think about the humans behind it. The humans that create the algorithm, the dataset, or even the idea to use the technology in the first place.

I believe it’s important to consider these aspects and to be aware of what’s happening ‘behind the scenes’. It’s the only way we can ensure some kind of responsible implementation.

As much as the combination of human and technology can be problematic, there are wonderful and mind blowing opportunities here. This is what I wanted to come through in my piece.

Of course, there can be a lot of alarming findings when we look beyond the output. And the summit is brilliant at bringing these important issues to light.

At the same time, the summit also acknowledges the possibilities too. As much as the combination of human and technology can be problematic, there are wonderful and mind blowing opportunities here. This is what I wanted to come through in my piece.

In terms of putting it all together, I started by using machine learning to generate a flower. I created my own dataset (I do this as much as I can), photographing hundreds of daffodils and tulips and chrysanthemums at home.

I wanted the human and machine output to overlap and intermingle, to feel like one.

Once I had all my photos, I trained a GAN using the StyleGAN2 model on Runway ML. I didn’t run the model for as long as normal, as I wanted the flowers to have a more abstract feel to them. The flower I chose for the piece captured the daffodils and tulips in the dataset. I also thought it was pretty joyful.

The next part was bringing the human into the image. I wanted the human and machine output to overlap and intermingle, to feel like one. So I turned to good old-fashioned, handmade collage techniques. Using a craft knife, I cut strips and layered them on top of the other, so you could see both at the same time.

This worked well and I liked the rough edges, knife cuts and splodges of glue that ended up on my early drafts. I almost stopped at this point, but I wanted to play a little more and create a higher resolution image.

So once I was happy, I took the idea into photo editing software. Just as I’d done offline, I cut the image into sections and re-created the collage on the screen.

This is what you see here.

I also created a slightly different version with a little movement and colour.”

We hope you like the image and feel it represents some of the key themes at the Summit this year.

If you’d like to find out more about Kerry, you’ll find her at @thecreativeandthemachine on Instagram.

She’s also running one of our Summit workshops, Get Creative with Machine Learning, which you can book when you buy a ticket today.