AI Generated Abstract Watercolor Series, 2022
AI-generated images (DALL-E 2)
Swedish-Moroccan artist Maria Björkdahl was trained as a traditional painter with an emphasis on materiality and process. Her transition to AI-generated art bridges the physical and the digital; Björkdahl’s works exist both as born-digital objects and as physical printed editions. AI Generated Abstract Watercolor Series explores the materialism of watercolor through artificial means. The works are composed in a collaboration between the artist and DALL-E 2, but still reflect the texture of a hand-mixed pigment-and-water paint. The resulting abstract images are imperfect, challenging the popular AI imagery of hyperreal and fantastic imagery. By printing archival editions, Björkdahl also investigates the notion of a unique, individual art object. According to the artist: “I’m interested in blurring the distinction between traditionally viewed authorship of an original piece of art and AI generated, possibly authorless, mass produced images.”
Artist Bio
Maria Björkdahl is a Swedish-Moroccan visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her art focuses on notions of unearthing multiple layers and buried memories. Using materiality and process, she mines ideas of meaning embedded in the material, by either literally taking apart and unraveling the warp and weft of the traditional cotton duck painting support, or stitching old pocket calendar pages onto canvas, or more recently, exploring ideas of authorship surrounding AI generated art. Maria’s work has been shown throughout Southern California including Artcore, Launch LA, The Museum of Latin American Art, and Gallery 825. She is a member of Los Angeles Art Association, a grant recipient from the Center for Cultural Innovation, and has attended international art residencies in Germany at the Berlin Art Institute and in Sweden at the “Tomma Rum” (Empty Rooms) residency.
Maria is a graduate of San Francisco State University (M.A. International Relations) and Uppsala University, Sweden (BA Anthropology). She has studied studio art; drawing and painting, art theory and art history at Santa Monica College, El Camino College and Cal State Dominquez Hills University.
Maria Björkdahl On her journey with AI in the legacy of her creative practice:
“Hello, my name is Maria Bjorkdahl. I'm a Swedish-Moroccan visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.
My art is very material oriented, I use traditional art materials such as canvas, paint, paper, ink and watercolor and I like to manipulate and use them perhaps in unconventional ways by taking the canvas apart and re-attaching it again and with the paper I like to make three-dimensional forms. I first got interested in AI art last summer. There were a lot of articles that were being published at the time, so I thought I would experiment with it. I was particularly interested in erasing the idea between what is artificially made and what is human made.
So I strived to make, together with the AI program Dall-e 2 in this case, abstract art that looked like it had the trace of the human hand. I would say that my art practice has been influenced by this insofar that the idea has taken a much more central role in the creation of artwork. Before I felt that the artwork was the embodiment of an idea, growing out of the working of the material, now it's more of a mental idea that guides the process.”