realised by ni_si_ai
AI portraits of the most influential writers of all time
The emergence of new AI imaging technologies allows the recreation, with reasonable effort, of truthful, photographic quality images, starting from old drawings and engravings or from more or less veristic portraits.
Two decades ago, I created, for a book cover, a portrait of Voltaire, half photographic. The work was enormous. I was aware from the very beginning of that, but in the end the scheduled working time was exceeded by dozens of hours. Today, with AI support, in a few hours you can get several variants of such works: plausible portraits, on which the final interventions are reasonable. Moreover, AI allows for quick integration of the character into context, which I find extremely important.
It’s laborious to add leather or fabric texture to a vectorized shape from an old painting or drawing. And that’s especially difficult if you have to create it in lighting gradients. However, with a lot of work, it can be done. But placing a historical figure in a photographic context is even more difficult because it includes relationships between objects, planes of shadow and light, homogeneity of chromatic palette and chromatic space. Even the difference in granularity or heterozygosis of dots inherited from photographic sources that have gone through different compressions – everything influences the final product and, if you are a perfectionist, adds many hours of work in photographic editing through (already!) classic software. If you want to change the orientation of a character, the position of the arms, the angle from which he is photographed, 2D editing techniques are extremely cumbersome, imprecise and characterized by information destruction. Instead, with AI, all of this becomes accessible with a reasonable amount of work. And the main creative effort moves from the technical aspects to the conception and semantic definition of the portrait.
A year ago, turning a drawing into a photograph could only be part of an ambitious graphic reconstruction project. Now the whole operation can be reduced to the hobby stage.
So I recreated the portraits of almost 100 writers because I could. But also because it was needed. The images of many of the old writers are unrealistic. Many were not portrayed during their lifetime. Those from the 19th and 20th centuries benefit mostly from photographs that have survived to this day. But those before them didn’t gain a public image until decades (or hundreds of years) after death. For some of the greatest (Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes), the images available are strange and unfriendly. I admit that such images have a very important role, that of icon or logo, and that’s ok: because a writer is and must be a brand. (At least to be able to resist in our world today, which is one dominated by brands). But at the same time, such strange images, as well as black-and-white portraits of daguerreotype, create a film of remoteness, a zone of rupture from our world. With such images, the ancient writers are somewhere, far away, completely separated from our lives, with almost nothing in common with us.
But the great writers are among the major artisans of our world.
Recovering the image of old writers is an effort of rapprochement and rediscovery. I tried to represent them in modern clothes and in contemporary contexts precisely to bring them closer to those of today. I tried to discreetly integrate into the recreated photographs not only physiognomic features (more or less historically documented), but also defining elements from the biography or work. And in this chapter, simply translating from a historical context to a contemporary one can lead to a complete failure in understanding the character. If a 19th century writer appears in photos (as is usually the case) dressed in a suit, its placement in contemporary context rarely makes sense to represent him dressed in the same way. It is a whole socio-demographic complex, characteristic of the post-aristocratic era, that of bourgeois revolutions, which led people to wear a suit and tie or bow tie in the 19th century. Back then, that clothing represented both a social status and political and social values, which today are connotated quite differently. The dress code of a century or two ago required, as an expression of incipient (and still insufficiently articulated) democracy, demanded uniformity through standardization of clothing and colors. For comparison, women’s clothing in the same era was much more varied, in shapes and colors – and this fact reflects precisely the lack of democratic rights for women. As their political rights were limited, pressure on conformity and “equality” of clothing was reduced. In the case of women’s clothes, there was thus room for a wide range of other connotations (moral, aesthetic, status, or even religious and/or esoteric symbolism), assumed more or less consciously.
In even older times, clothes noted more clearly religious, politic and social principles. For example, Shakespeare gained the privilege of wearing generously decorated noble clothes over those of his social status. However, some of the portraits attributed to him have been challenged by art historians precisely because they represent him too young and too richly dressed, with lace or embroidery to which his social condition would not have entitled. In the 16th and 17th centuries, clothing was extremely important in England, and the dress code was regulated by numerous laws and edicts. The rise of the middle class gave it the financial means to acquire elaborate garments. However, the nobility wanted to preserve clothing as a way of directly expressing political power. Hence, a whole legislation forbidding small nobility and townspeople to wear clothes by which they could be mistaken for nobles. Such legislation existed everywhere in Europe, from Dublin to Istanbul.
So, in a small portrait from past centuries, even when it has very few details, there are many political, social, philosophical, aesthetic, esoteric connotations. Each of those elements are today denoted differently. Resuscitating an old portrait, in my opinion, means a careful recreation of these notations, a decoding of them as faithfully as possible, and a projection into today’s languages and codes.
However, why is the image of writers important? Discussing that with AI (chat models, not graphic ones), at the beginning of this project, I found that it believes that the writers’ work is self-sufficient and the author’s person or persona is insignificant. The two patterns of thought (open opera and psychosocial catabasis) are constants of artistic reception. Before Eco and Bourdieu, before Lacan and Freud, or before the “autonomy of the aesthetic” and the New Criticism, without having concepts to describe them, consumers of literature (and art in general) constantly oscillated between one accent and the other. Both answers have their consistency.
A work of universal value certainly has the capacity to be self-sufficient and self-explanatory. But this is just one type of reading. Another type of reading (or artistic decoding) is the investigative one, through the recreation or illumination of the context. With societies evolving rapidly, by leaps of extreme magnitude, many older works lose essential parts when not interpreted in context. On the one hand, their most spectacular aesthetic tools are copied and copied again and copied more in current art, until they become, without the original context, generic templates and flat patterns, drained of emotion and expressiveness. On the other hand, the nuances of some expressions or sequences have become imperceptible today as expressiveness has changed itself or some of the social values have changed or been reevaluated.
Classical playwrights retained their relevance much better than prose writers or poets of the same era. The key is that staging a performance involves a recontextualization of the libretto. Their works are thus permanently rejuvenated with each spectacle, since the stagings also become a reference for each other. Poetic works or prose works do not have the same chance. Attempts to update a classic work are rare, and they happen only when the language has changed to the point of becoming completely unintelligible. Therefore, reading a classic work in a social, historical and psycho-biographical context has the role of essentially improving reception. And the author is, in this perspective, not only con-text, but also (through the inherent literaturization of his own biography) pre-text and meta-text of great works.