Designer Alan de Sousa Silva on the creative power of staying playful

Despite an unlikely pathway, Brazilian creative Alan de Sousa Silva has emerged as a uniquely ambitious designer. It’s a story he credits to a mixture of luck, determination and the transformative power of the internet. The 29-year-old told us about his creative journey against the odds, and the unlikely ways in which AI excites him.

I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and have lived there most of my life – along with some experiences working and living in Germany. When I think about my journey, I wasn’t supposed to have all these opportunities. My parents grew up in a scarce environment, but were the generation who were able to move to São Paulo. Then I’ve been able to move even further, travelling and working internationally. In three generations the landscape has changed completely. I was born with this will, this wish, this desire to be out of there; to be expressive in the way I live my life.

I grew up on the far-east side of the city. When I was a teenager, I started a technician course for programming. I hated it, but at least I had access to the internet. And the people that were studying with me came from other parts of the city, so they had a different mentality to mine. This combination of the internet, and contact with people from different contexts, kind of opened my mind to what I could do.

I started my design career in 2013. Almost everything I know is self taught: from design to speaking English. It started with Behance, Tumblr and Pinterest. Those websites were all the visual access I had. I was more driven by style at first – and I still am today. I did a bachelor’s degree at a small university in São Paulo, but it was very shallow in content. I had to do my own work to understand technique, principles and style. Mostly I learned through trial and error. In the last two years I’ve undertaken a masters with a school in Barcelona, which has helped give structure to everything I learned.

Right now I'm doing freelance work. I did have a design studio with my ex partner, which we ran for four years, branding for small and then major companies. But I didn't want the studio to grow that way, it was too corporate. Today, I'm doing small projects that are more meaningful, where I pick the subject. Most of them have to do with black identity and the African heritage we have here in Brazil. For the past ten years – I think from 2015 until now – we've been having more conversations about it, and I'm really glad. Most of the opportunities I’ve had, have come from raising that flag, raising those questions. I bump into other people like me, and we have this rage, because we can't access as much, or we're struggling a lot to get just a little bit. This reflects on the projects that I accept – always in the areas of BIPOC or LGBTQ identities.

I have been exploring AI for about two years, since Midjourney was first popping off. My first reference was actually people on Twitter, who were just playing around with the technology and sharing stuff they found funny. For me, it reminded me of the beginnings of the internet. It wasn’t about commercial work, it was just playing with HTML and making those weird ugly websites where everything is blinking and flashing. I started experimenting because I'm excited about technology, and I'm excited about the future.

exactly.ai caught my attention because you can develop styles. Before, to create a model, you had to go into the programming section and then create a machine. With exactly.ai you have an interface to do that. With a little bit of time, it’s going to be a really interesting tool for me to have. With AI, I'm trying to get the absurd out of it. I'm not really interested in creating a masterpiece of ultra reality. I want the bizarre. I want imagination. Generating the new, rather than replicating something that already exists

I have created a model called ‘Afro Diasporican Portraits’. I’m interested in how we only have images of suffering related to Brazil’s African heritage. The advent of AI provides a new tool to imagine and create other pictorial symbols that lay far away from these images of control. It restores humanity, creativity, and joy in blackness. There are some weird results from this model that I’ll probably use for a project I’m working on, which is a digital archive of racist laws in Brazilian history.

For another model, I was trying to use only open public library images. I saw there was a style there already – encyclopaedia, gritty and grainy. I think the results I generated with this one were more interesting because the model created an interpretation rather than a replication. I generated some vases that look like they’re 3D, but within an encyclopaedia. It's interesting because it’s new, but it's old. It’s weird, and I like it! For now, it's just an experiment. If I have a collection in the future, I'll make some collages using it.

For me, AI is there to create something that doesn't exist in the real world, as it was with 3D, and other tools we use today. It’s there to push us to be more expressive. I think again about the person who is making stuff and posting it on Twitter as a meme. They’re just playing around. They don’t have a pretentious attitude that says, “I want to go there…” No, they’re just throwing some words in and suddenly they have something funny which they post on the internet. And that’s it.

There’s an analogy with the music scene here in Brazil – in baile funk to be specific. Brazilian funk, São Paulo funk, it's killer. Everyone wants to copy it. But when you interview the artists that make it, you discover that their background is not in classical music. They're just playing around with Ableton or some other tool that they have cracked online. So it's not the tool, it’s how you use it. And I want to be even more expressive, push my experimental phase, mess around.