L-systems flowers 1

by Robbie Barrat

L-system rendered flower on a unplugged e-ink screen mounted on wood

9 5/8 x 7 1/4 inches

Regular price
Sale price
$5,500.00

This series of five delicate and ghostly images are ‘prints’ in e-ink on screens familiar from devices such as Kindle. To produce these Barrat set an animation he had produced running on a device and then ripped out the connecting cables from his computer to the e-screen, capturing the image in a frozen moment. 

This aesthetic of flowers and foliage and the process of a single ‘exposure’ evokes the early cyanotype camera-less photographic experiments of the mid 19th century by Sir John Herschel and Anna Atkins. However, rather than a single physical object being exposed to light and its form recorded, Barrat chooses to freeze a frame from an animation of his own 3d digital model of a flower, which he created using code he calls L-systems. 

He used a neural network trained on both a dataset of low quality gardening software screenshots and a dataset he curated of his favourite colour field paintings. This desire to evoke the hand-painted comes from Barrat’s interest in expressions of love which he associates with human touch, and which the symbol of the flower is indelibly entwined. However, Barrat decided the resulting e-ink images should include the pixelation and ‘dithering’ so as not to deny their generative and digital nature.

About Robbie Barrat

Robbie Barrat (b.1999) is a Dublin-born, West Virginia-raised artist, who uses machine learning and GANs, to explore fashion, architecture, and art history, focusing on AI's interpretation of data. Barrat's art, which views AI as both a medium and a tool, has been exhibited internationally, including at the Musée de la Mode Hasselt, Ars Electronica, System Failure in San Francisco, ArtJaws in New York, and the Late Tate during the Nam June Paik show. His debut show, Infinite Skulls, was a collaboration with French painter Ronan Barrot at Avant Galerie Vossen in 2019. Initially focused on AI as both tool and subject, his recent work integrates AI into a broader creative process.

L-systems flowers 1
L-systems flowers 1