Lawrence Lee, acclaimed Contemporary Southwestern artist, and Bård Ionson, coder with a keen eye and an artistic bent, have begun a fascinating journey of collaboration that melds paintings with modern artificial intelligence technology.

Lee’s “magic people” inhabit a separate reality that seems to be of another world--a multidimensional one. By combining one of the original human creative outlets, painting, and advanced math with new technologies, a multitude of mages, seers, shamans and sages has been born.

This is a creation built on a lifetime of Lee’s creations at the easel. Bård used over 250 Lee paintings to train a machine learning / artificial intelligence system and used his own creative skills to perfect the output of the software and to curate results.  Lee then worked to identify the best of the generated images and used his digital painting skills and immense creativity to improve on what Bård produced. With each iteration, new possibilities were revealed, and the pair are excited by the prospect of further development, incorporating new technologies as they become available and following the lead of some of the images produced thus far into new, previously unimagined areas.

Bård is now taking the improved results to teach the AI model all over again.

Art will be sold on SuperRare. Please find these Shaman works we call Convergence on SuperRare on the profiles of Lawrence Lee and Bård Ionson 

More information: http://bardionson.com/gallery/newconvergence.html

(Early AI GAN faces)

The goal was to expand the creative palette like a hallucinatory dream. Controlled by Bård with training selections, the AI produced a googleplex of possible random outcomes. Lawrence and Bård have hand-selected the best of each production run from the machine, and Lawrence has worked to unearth these new shamans and the landscapes they inhabit by enhancing them further and augmenting their otherworldly qualities in an attempt to better understand their roots and to release their powers. 

Ionson and Lee will be releasing the series of images created, called Convergence, as weekly package drops of three still images and one video on SuperRare. Find them starting on June 23.

Convergence Ab The Bård artificial intelligence version |  Convergence Ab - After Lawrence Lee turns it into art. 

Please find these Shaman works we call Convergence on SuperRare on the profiles of Lawrence Lee and Bård Ionson 

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Lawrence is one of the small number of fine artists in the space of tokenized art because he is always looking for ways to expand and learn new things. He has been a professional artist for over 40 years.  He is one of the original adopters of non-fungible tokens on SuperRare for his digital art. In addition he has created computer art from early in the personal computer age. 

Bård Ionson is an artist who is relative to Lawrence, a beginner with art but has spent a career working with computers and programming. He is now creating digital art and video art using oscilloscopes, scanners and artificial intelligence technologies.

https://vimeo.com/430795681