Valentin Golubkov, ‘Future Space’ (2024)

 


Golubkov is a Russian artist, or ‘artist’: moderator of an online forum for SF Art called SCI-FI AND SPACE ART which hosts AI-generated imagery of a science-fictional bent. So Golubkov has not exactly created this artwork.

The impact of these new technologies of visual representation has been enormous, over a relatively short space of time, but it remains to be seen how significant or shaping such ‘artwork’ will be going forward. Here Golubkov has typed-in the parameters for what he wants, and an AI visual generator (it is not clear which one: there are several) has produced this image by triaging gigantic datasets of visual imagery, scraped from publically accessible online content, and confecting elements together. Millions of works of art are generated this way annnually; and impossible number with which to keep up. It is one of the distinctive styles or, we could say, schools of art of the 2020s.

The works of art created in this way can possess a superficial vividness and panache, although they will be inherently plagiaristic—in this image, the gigantic tanker-spacecraft is a variant of the Fenrir ships in the space-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game EVE Online—and will tend to include visual flubs, implausibilities of impossibilities that a human artist would not perpetrat. The classic ‘tell’ in AI generated portraits is too many, or too few, human fingers. Here the human figures are positioned close to and in some cases actually over the edge of the metal canyon edge.

A Fenrir spacecraft from EVE-online

Yet there is something in this image: for all that it was confected out of zeros and ones, it communicates heft, scale, something of the industrial-tech sense of wonder. And it is texturally an interesting work. That it cannot be attributed to a human artist, and the ethical problematic of a programme that steals to rework the art of precisely such people, notwithstanding, there is a sense that this mode is the true heir of the traditions of SF art. What could be more sciencefictional than a work of art created by machine? 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Dean's landscapes

Image
  In 2013, the Royal Academy staged a comprehensive exhibition ‘Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape’. The argument of the display, elaborated in its catalogue, was that the development of landscape painting in the 18th century was dominated by a variety called ‘topography’, and sometimes ‘strict topography’, committed to ‘the accurate recording of particular places’: artists like Paul Sandby (1731-1809), who began as a map-maker, and carried a cartographic precision of representation over into his accomplished landscape watercolours; or Michael Angelo Rooker (1746-1801), who worked scrupulously in oils and watercolours. But in the early 19th century, however, topographical art was ‘transcended by something much more serious and more powerful, a sublime style of painting that sought to represent the grandeur of nature’ rather than accurately to reproduce it, and by exaggerating, distorting, or augmenting and inventing, to produce in viewers ‘feelings of aw...
Read more

Michael Whelan, ‘Chanur’s Homecoming’ (1986)

Image
 American artist Michael Whelan (born 1950) was inducted into ‘ The Science Fiction Hall of Fame ’ in June 2009, the first living artist so honoured. His Hall of Fame citation describes him as ‘one of the most important contemporary science fiction and fantasy artists, and certainly the most popular. His work was a dominant force in the transition of genre book covers away from the surrealism introduced in the 1950s and 1960s back to realism.’ In demand, copiously productive, Whelan has produced a deal of work for DAW books, and much for other imprints too: SF, Fantasy and Horror. His run of awards is particularly impressive: he won the Hugo for Best Professional Artist in seven consecutive years—1980 to 1986—and only didn’t win again in 1987 because he declined the nomination (he subsequently won the same award six further times, also receiving the 1988 Best Nonfiction Hugo award for his compilation, Michael Whelan's Works of Wonder ). Whelan has also won many Locus Awards, Chesl...
Read more

Space Ark

Image
The animals march, two-by-two, into an Apollo-era rocket, as the skies grey and pour behind. The image is cover art by Alex Schomburg for Fantastic (October 1961), illustrating Robert Young's novella of a new Flood, Deluge II . Schomburg, born Alejandro Schomburg y Rosa (1905-1998), was a Puerto Rican commercial artist of remarkable precision and fineness of line; and his artwork here entirely encapsulates Young's tale, cutting through the early sections (‘the ancient stresses were ready to tear the earth apart, and only Anton Burke was ready. He planned to choose his passenger-list with care. But when the time came, his space-ship Ark was empty—save for the strangest friends a man could have on a journey to the stars’) to the Noahic revelation at the story's end, that Burke will be accompanied to safety and the stars by Earth's beasts rather than its human population. By angling the scene ten degrees to the right, Burke adds dynamism and verve to what might have been a...
Read more