Architectural competition winner Ksenia Shinkovskaya on using ai to discover hidden meanings

Sculptor Ksenia Shinkovskaya (@wool_bulb) spoke to us about exhibiting AI works, exactly.ai competitions and enthusiasm for artistic exploration with AI.

I was drawn to exactly.ai as a tool because of its ability to use my own work and understand me. When you train a model on your own artwork you see how the AI is attempting to decode your portfolio and decipher your visual language. In the process it often finds hidden codes, internal parallels and creates a unique vocabulary for your work.

As artists so much of our creative force is inaccessible to us, it’s driven by intuition and the way we view and connect with the world which is buried deep in our subconscious. I found that exactly.ai helped me to realise many meanings and depths of my own work which I hadn’t noticed before. It taught me to create visual messages on a new level using the patterns which it discovered.

For example, in the works I exhibited at the Roman Gallery in Latvia, exactly.ai discovered the emotional sensibilities of my sculpture and brought them to the forefront. Maxim Pogrebnyak (@neuromaxart) and I trained an exactly.ai model on photographs of my Pilgrims - a series of sculptures made of felt and driftwood. By freeing ourselves from the constraints of working with particular materials we were able to craft prompts which heightened the emotional expressiveness of the characters. We took our favourite generations and printed them on canvases. They were a great hit with visitors and collectors, some sold, some remained with the collection and others are going on tour.

Occasionally I do get pushback about my use of AI. People will claim that I’m betraying art or my background as an analog artist. But I don’t take it to heart - the device you use to be creative has never mattered. Whether you create using a brush, fibres or AI, as long as there is a goal and a meaning behind your work, the tool will never be in the driver's seat, only an assistant.

I think coming up with a goal for your work is also the secret to winning exactly.ai competitions - you need a motivation that draws directly from the conditions and meaning of the particular contest. Take this competition, it was about envisioning a future where spaces are not just for humans but other living creatures. I took the competition’s meaning quite literally - imagining that the other creature in question was the building itself.

I have a dream of a future where scientists develop a universal living matter. A material capable of forming itself into anything - a house, a means of transport or even a pet! I wanted to generate images of an architectural future where buildings were made with this kind of substance.

To train a model capable of realising my vision, I used a selection of photographs of my biomorphic sculptures - surrealist constructions of animals made with felt, glass and mirrors. By prompting this model for architectural designs the organic forms were use to construct buildings which gave the impression of being alive. I had initially been hesitant about the limited submissions for this competition but it ended up working in my favour. I had to be highly selective, closely analysing and selecting only the very best images I created.

I think this kind of transmutation is where exactly.ai really shines - by finding patterns in my animalistic sculptures it was able to bring buildings to life. Lately I have been working on a private model trained on collections of found objects. My aim for the models is that it will find patterns in the assemblages and be able to turn them into portraits. The model will take a description of people’s quirks and return a surrealist representation encompassing them all. I’ll be able to take commissions in the form of short descriptions and give the portraits in return.

The more I work with exactly.ai the more I’m convinced of its place within a toolkit for artistic expression. It enables me to transcend traditional mediums and experiment in ways I would never have imagined. There are always new possibilities for me, revealing patterns and symbolism that I hadn’t noticed in my own work. As ever, the future of art won’t be shaped by the tools at our disposal, but by the creativity and ideas that drive the work forward.