Damien Hirst Debuts One-Of-A-Kind Digital Paintings That You Generate Yourself
Damien Hirst is once again dipping his paintbrush into the snowballing world of generative art.
The latest series, The Beautiful Paintings, is the peak representation of the digital art revolution. It features a selection of non-fungible tokens—though wary collectors can still opt for physical versions—and the works are wholly unique since each is randomized with the help of machine-learning models. All told, this newfangled process has been over a year in the making as Hirst worked with data science experts from art tech firm HENI to develop a generative algorithm that churns out paintings in 25 primary styles.
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The Beautiful Paintings is a spinoff of Hirst’s 1992 Spin Paintings series, in which the artist splashed paint onto a revolving turntable to create mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind pieces. Where it departs from the original is that, instead of a turntable, there’s now a ‘Spin Generator’ that determines the title, color names, and final look of each artwork.
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Collectors click through a dashboard to initiate the creation process, equipped with the ability to decide on the combination of hues, style, shape, and size of their Beautiful Painting. Even so, every piece is unique, mimicking the randomness that comes with tossing paint onto a spinning platform.
Every artwork gets its own title through a transformer neural network model that can come up with a “never-ending variety” of descriptors, though each name starts with ‘Beautiful’ and ends with ‘Painting’.
The expansive spectrum of color options is named by GPT models, giving monikers like ‘Himalayan Waters’, ‘Dolphin’s Whiskers’, ‘Tangerine Pine’, ‘Cracked Grass’, and ‘Interdimensional Cloud’.
Buyers can opt for a digital version in NFT form, a physical format, or both. The NFT variations arrive in the collector’s preferred shape of a circle or square. Meanwhile, the physical paintings are upscaled to a 16K resolution (with help from a machine-learning model trained on the old Spin Paintings) and printed on canvas, before being hand-signed by Hirst with a paint pen; these works are also available in two shapes and four sizes.
The canvases can go anywhere from US$1,500 to US$6,000, depending on their size, while the NFTs keep to a price of US$2,000. The works will only be on offer until April 10.
I'm beyond excited to release my new project with @HENI The Beautiful Paintings which uses a generative algorithm & machine learning to create spin artworks. I've created 25 spin styles & other options you can choose from to generate unique artworks. https://t.co/g2jJ741Iu6 (1/5) pic.twitter.com/hUdz1YBwZ1
— Damien Hirst (@hirst_official) March 31, 2023
[via The Art Newspaper, FAD Magazine, HENI, images via various sources]
