How Kiwi artist creates whimsical works using AI
Barnett’s Flying Bed series was created as she lay in bed deeply unwell, using only her phone and laptop. Felicity Monk reports.
KEZIA Barnett’s Flying Bed artwork series is like something from a dream. Ethereal and delicate, there’s an otherworldly, poetic quality to her images. A sadness, too.
There are pictures of beds covered with rocks, of a female figure who is buried in the earth up to her neck, another whose face is only just above water. The images were created as Barnett lay in bed deeply unwell, using only her phone and occasionally her laptop.
Barnett creates artworks using artificial intelligence (AI). She inputs text prompts describing the kind of image she wants into an image-creation tool that generates a picture, rendered using the program’s vast datasets of imagery.
The result is a kind of co-creation between Barnett’s imagination and the AI’s interpretation of the text. Barnett iterates again and again until she is happy with the image. Or she abandons it and starts again. She can spend hours on each image, editing and refining. The AI program will never produce the same image twice, even with identical text prompts, as the algorithm is always evolving and improving.
Barnett, 47, is an award-winning director of short films, commercials and music videos who enjoyed a successful career both here and overseas until she became seriously ill. In 2011 she was in South Africa directing the biggest job of her career when she contracted a virus, from which she never fully recovered. A short time later, she sustained a severe concussion that affects her to this day.
She was based in London, but too sick to work, returned to Auckland. ‘‘Nobody seemed to know what was wrong with me. I kept on trying to create and work, not knowing it was making me sicker.’’
Barnett would eventually learn her concussion was a lot worse than first thought and was diagnosed with postconcussion syndrome. This was in addition to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a condition with a bewildering set of symptoms, including debilitating fatigue, cognitive
dysfunction, sleep disturbance and pain – all made worse by exertion – often triggered by a traumatic injury or virus.
Barnett has spent most of the past few years in bed. ‘‘When I’m at my sickest I get very sound sensitive. I get light sensitive. I get a lot of body pain. Being upright feels upside down, so I have to lie flat. It feels like my blood is lead, like I’m buried alive, like I’m underwater. Cognitively, I feel very far away . . . I am about 95% bed bound at the moment and the isolation can be extreme.’’
Barnett only began creating AI art in July and has since made thousands of images, with only some making the final cut. She says Web3 (a new iteration of the world wide web that hosts decentralised apps that run on blockchain technology) has opened her up to a huge online community: ‘‘I’ve been looking for a way to continue creating imaginary worlds and telling stories. I’ve been wanting to find an artistic expression of my experience, to raise awareness for the millions of people around the world that are suffering . . . in a way that people want to look at it, and not just look away.’’
Flying Bed is one of three series, along with Bubblegum Queen and Ethereum Forests, which comprise the Fairytales Dreams collection. She invites collectors to participate in shaping the narrative. They can help name the characters and have a say in what happens, using the blockchain technology and the direct connection between artist and collector. All works are one-of-a-kind and are for sale as NFTs (nonfungible token is a digital identifier recorded in a blockchain and used to certify authenticity and ownership). Barnett’s images sell for 0.1 Ethereum (about NZ$235 but this can fluctuate wildly).
Predictably, AI has caused consternation in the art world – just like the introduction of Photoshop before it, and digital photography before that. Some art communities and marketplaces are banning AI-generated images, along with galleries that say they won’t show AI art. Gary Langsford of Auckland’s Gow Langsford Gallery says: ‘‘We certainly wouldn’t not take on an artist because they were using a component of AI . . . There’s good art that’s made with artificial intelligence and there’s really bad art. It comes down to how the artist is using the technology and the image that they are actually making.’’ Ultimately, says Langsford, it’s just another creative tool in the artist’s toolbox.
You can see Kezia Barnett’s art on Opensea.