Post-McQueen
Harnessing artificial intelligence as a means to preserve Alexander McQueen’s creative practice
For this project, I examined the concept of creative preservation and legacy via artificial intelligence through the work of Alexander McQueen. Consolidating his collections into a dataset, an algorithm was trained and generated over 500,000 images of what his work might look like through the mind of a machine. The imagery from the AI was used to create two physical pieces and served as the main narrative in a virtual film. The imagery and gowns created from the images serve as points of provocation to interrogate the dissonance between the analogue and the digital as well as explore what creativity would look like from the mind of a machine. But moreover, the outputs aim to question the overall role of technology and how comfortable we are in handing over our roles to machines and letting them take over our creative process forever.
With the proliferation of artificial intelligence, we are on a consistent move toward technological singularity, the concept of machine intelligence surpassing that of human intelligence. And with that, the lines of what it means to be human and alive or not are being blurred. It is said that we live on through the legacy of our life’s work, but can that be sustained through artificial means and, if so, how will our future creative practice evolve?
Danielle Adams
dkadams42@gmail.com
daniellekadams.com