Virtual workshop via Zoom. Find more info about The Next 50 Years project on our website.
AI.Craft will continue its consideration of the impact of artificial intelligence on visual art with our second virtual discussion, this time with artists Ben Bogart and Fatima Travassos. We will start by looking at how Ben and Fatima have each approached generative art and AI in their respective practices, then dive once again into the broader implications of the use of AI tools on art production and reception.
Registration is required. Sign up for this event.
Fatima Travassos is a former fashion stylist and menswear buyer turned digital artist based in Vancouver, Canada. Her fashion editorials have been featured in Vancouver Magazine, Flare Magazine, and Xtra West. Her current personal art practice utilizes 2D handmade artworks crafted from vintage latex and vinyl which explore diverse forms of tension.
Harnessing the power of AI prompts, Travassos reimagines her handmade creations as innovative AI artworks. These artworks have been showcased in virtual galleries, most notably in Spatial.io, and have also been minted as NFTs. In some instances, her digital creations take the form of wearable art in the Metaverses or transform into phygital twins (physical goods/digital twins).
Travassos’ AI fashion styling is featured in 4Me4You Magazine, and will be featured FAIYË Magazine, ALANA Magazine, as well as issue #3 of Amen Magazine—the world’s first AI generated men’s fashion magazine. Travassos was also a contestant in the world’s first AI fashion week show held online and IRL (in real life) in New York.
Prior to exploring generative artworks, Travassos spent 12 years designing original artworks for international hotels, and was the public relations person for her company, visiting the top 28 artisans in Rome, Italy to help promote and preserve local arts, crafts and services, while furthering international creative relations.
Travassos is a collaborator/co-creator with several web3 organizations including The Fashion Dao (NY), FashionAI (UK), OpenFashion (Japan), Ecoolska (Portugal), Maison Dao (Germany), and DressX (L.A.)
Ben Bogart (they/them) is a non-binary agender adisciplinary artist working for two decades with generative computational processes (including physical modelling, chaotic equations, feedback systems, evolutionary algorithms, computer vision and machine learning) and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences (quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience) in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences in Canada, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Turkey, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway and Spain. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Canadian Embassy at Transmediale in 2017 and the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018. They have been an artist in residence in Canada at the Banff Centre, New Forms Festival, Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen, Deer Lake Park and internationally at Videotage (Hong Kong). Their research and practice have been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Ben enjoys tickling various mosses, can eat a lemon slice including peel without flinching, and if they had to be a bird would love to be a swallow.
Ben holds both master’s and doctorate degrees from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. During their master’s study (2006–2008) they began an artistic inquiry of machine learning and developed a site-specific artwork that uses images captured live in the context of installation as raw material in its ‘creative’ process. In their doctoral work (2009–2014) they made “a machine that dreams” that is framed as both a model of dreaming and a site-specific artistic work manifesting an Integrative Theory of visual mentation developed during their doctorate. Ben’s recent work involves building Machine Subjects that appropriate and reconstruct cultural artifacts using artificial intelligence. Ben has recently completed a new body of work funded by the Canada Council for the Arts applying machine learning methods to image-making situated in painting history.
Ben is a settler of Dutch and French ancestry and lives and works on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̍əm (Musqueam), Sk̠wx̠wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Peoples, also known as Vancouver.