‘Imposture’ series

Imposture series is a collection of six prints from 2017, which includes The Butcher’s Son, awarded the Lumen Prize Gold Award in 2018.

The series reflects Klingemann’s long-term interest in pushing AI models to surprise the viewer with their visual outputs. For these works, the artist focussed on the human body, training his AI models to explore posture by turning stick figures into paintings, based on the analysis of images harvested from the internet. Each Imposture series image is generated entirely by a machine, “painted” by a generative adversarial network (GAN). This network adds new information to low resolution content using a method known as “transhancement”: skin texture, hair or other pixelated forms complete the image. The result is painterly and ethereal, a neural network’s vision of the human form.

For Mario Klingemann, the presence of artifacts — visual anomalies in these machine- generated images — is particularly significant. As the artist explains, “With photographic film, you get grain. With video, you get certain jpeg textures. Now you have neural networks and you get these convolutional artifacts. I find I like them. In this series I try to embrace the artifact.”

Each of the six works available has been selected by the artist himself from over 50,000 images created by his Imposture Series model. With their dream-like presence, textured forms and visual artifacts, these Imposture Series prints are genuine highlights of Klingemann’s artistic journey, a celebration of what AI models were able to produce back in 2017.