Meet the London-based artist using ai as a tool for transformation

Richard Paul is an artist based in Southeast London. He started his creative career as a still life photographer, before moving into the creation of 3D lenticulars. Recently he used exactly.ai for the first time, in order to experiment with a series of concrete sculptures he’d created from leftover construction materials.

I was always good at drawing at school. And it’s strange because my school wasn't very good at teaching art, so it was me and all the kids who’d been dumped there. It was quite a laugh, actually. They used to ask me to draw tattoos on their arms, and then they would fill it in with biro. I studied painting and drawing in Dundee, in Scotland, but by my final year I was doing mainly photography. I moved to London, did an MA at St. Martin's, and became a photographer. I was kind of disillusioned after leaving Scotland, trying to find my way. Then, in 2001, I started running a gallery.

It was myself and another MA student from St. Martin's. We used to drink in this pub called The Macbeth on Hoxton street. We went in there one time and they had an exhibition upstairs. My friend John was like, “how about we take over the space upstairs?” And the guy who ran the pub said yes. And that's how it started really. It was never an attempt to make any money. After a couple of years of doing that, I got my first solo show, which was at Seventeen Gallery.

I moved into doing the 3D pieces about ten years ago. I'd seen these books of what they call stereographs, you know, just pairs of photographs. It took me a long time to work out how to make them. I mostly make 3D lenticulars. You know those little postcards you used to get, with a sort of fake 3D effect? I make really big versions of those. I also made and still make 3D videos. One of my shows at Seventeen involved a 3D video installation, and Tate St Ives commissioned me to make a 3D video for their education department as well.

I've always been interested in transformation. One of the reasons I stopped painting for a while was because it never had that point at which it suddenly became something else. Whereas in the dark room, in the old days, when the image came up in the developer, I became obsessed with it. Recently I've been making sculptures in concrete. When you take the material, the sculpture, out the cast, you know, that's another transformation.

Most recently I made these small concrete heads. They're building a new city near my studio, just off the Old Kent Road. It's insane. These heads, for me, come out of the constant demolition and rebuilding happening there. I’d never used AI before, but somebody had posted something about exactly.ai online and I thought, well, I could try feeding images of my concrete work into an AI and maybe I’ll get some new ideas about how I could push them further – because a lot of people were liking them, but I'm not a sculptor, so I need a little bit of input. So I took photographs of them and put them through exactly.

It didn’t cope that well with the concrete at first, but when I put in “ceramic” it started producing these images. I could see they were related to the model quite closely but in a really great impression of ceramic. It kind of blew me away.

I did the first models, then I used the images I liked to create the second model. So it's like an evolution. There's an optician at the bottom of the road that had a poster with a really terrible photoshopped image of a model with an extra set of eyes. So I recreated that and put it in the model. Suddenly it started spitting out these heads with three or four sets of eyes, which I really loved. I've been reading a lot about a Dada artist called Francis Picabia. He did these pictures which are called the monster series, which had lots of different eyes. That’s what these images were doing for me. I've made a lot of 3D lenticulars from them so far, but the next thing I would like to do is try and make some actual ceramic heads.

I have concerns about AI – particularly in terms of energy consumption. In the art world, there's a backlash against it as well. It’s funny though. In my formative years in art school there was a postmodern idea about originality that basically asked, “how can you be original?” You're not original. You're getting inputs from advertising, TV, film, all the books you read. This massive amount of information that you process and spit back out.

In the end, I'm a sucker for transformation – novelty. Essentially, for me, AI is a tool. Almost like a medium, really, like, photography is a medium or silkscreen or sculpture. I find it very exciting, the new possibilities and new ideas it gave me; certainly as a stepping stone to something else. I think I've got enough material to last me quite a while.