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Thixotropy by Claire Silver

From Greek, Thixo: touch, Tropy: change. The time-dependent property of a solid material becoming fluid when touched, and returning to standing state upon rest. Rembrandt is theorized to have mixed thixotropic paint in his masterworks, which would have allowed his (at the time, radical) style of visible brushstrokes and varying sculptural surface textures. Thixotropy is adaptability--a building, shifting, "living" state, a physical conversation that is shaped by interaction, but returns, again and again, to its most natural form.

This piece was created by employing Imprimatura, the first piece in this collection, as the base layer for a kind of digital velatura. This base layer is static and includes digital hand-sketching, AI, and collaged public domain masterwork. It was given to several AI Models (Stable Diffusion via Stability AI, Artbreeder's "Collage," and Dalle2) to produce many works in the same stylistic family as the original piece, from portraits to landscapes to abstracts. These were then given, two frames at a time, to Google's FiLM (Frame Interpolation for Large Scene Motion) AI model, which generated several frames between each set of two, creating smooth, transformative motion.

The animated clips were layered and manipulated in After Effects, using a variety of stylistic and AI/Neural plugins (neural upscaling, style transfer, curve tracing, pixel stretching, transitions, detailing), and color corrected. A musical accompaniment was created with Soundraw.io, an accessible AI music model. The track was timed to align with aesthetic shifts in the visual piece. While its aesthetic is intentionally similar to the artist's early and 2021 works, as the sole 1/1 of the collection, it's process is entirely new. It is the first work of interpolation the artist has ever produced, along with the first work of music, AI-assisted or otherwise, the artist has ever made. It is both the end of an era and the beginning of a new Epoch. It is Thixotropy: adaptable, disruptive and progressibe, fluid and stable, frenetic and calm, alive with energy and resolute where it stands. It moves, one layered step at a time, across mediums, genres, and centuries, from cc0 masterwork to cutting edge AI models. The sketch lines are visible, glow and dance with electric intensity, and follow the curves of faces that bloom from a sea of Cambrian paint.

It is the fourth layer in a journey that mirrors the artist's life.

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Attributions

Music by Soundraw.io

AI Models: Stable Diffusion via StabilityAI Collage by Artbreeder/Studio Morphogen Dalle2 by OpenAI

Film by Google-Research @inproceedings{reda2022film, title = {Frame Interpolation for Large Motion}, author = {Fitsum Reda and Janne Kontkanen and Eric Tabellion and Deqing Sun and Caroline Pantofaru and Brian Curless}, booktitle = {arXiv}, year = {2022} }

Public Domain, cc0 Still life via Pexels

After Effects Plugins: Neural Enhancement Suite by Blace Curve Tracer by Sartori Pixel Stretch by Sartori Transitions by RedGiant Finisher by RedGiant StyleX by Vimager