‘Teratoma’ series

Recognisable forms turn abstract in Mario Klingemann’s ‘Teratoma Series’, a collection of 14 black and white prints created using artificial intelligence and hand-picked by the artist. Facial features melt into a swirling greyscale while bulbous masses of skin or texture seem to emerge and disappear.

The ‘Teratoma Series’ images recall surrealist photomontage yet rather than cameras and darkrooms, the tools employed here are neural networks. These are not collages or composites but single images generated by an AI model and selected from among thousands of outputs by Mario Klingemann. For this series, the model was trained on close-up photographic portraits collected by the artist over a number of years, along with images harvested from the internet and even outputs previously generated and discarded by other models and algorithms.

Given the dataset used, the ‘Teratoma Series’ model had to deal with a range of textural details including skin, hair and teeth. The processes through which these were incorporated by the machine inspired the artwork’s name: a teratoma is a rare kind of tumor which can contain different types of tissue, including hair, muscle, teeth and bone. Klingemann’s interest in texture also guided the decision to work in black and white. As the artist explains, “I found that when the model did not have to generate colour, it could focus its limited resources on producing better details.”

Teratoma Series, featured in GANland at DAM Gallery, Berlin, in 2020, is a fine example of what Klingemann refers to as “neurealism,” artwork produced using neural networks. An AI-aided exploration of texture, shape and the fluidity of figuration.