Success AI Stories of 0009, Lilyillo and Nikita Panin.

A Weekly AI Collective meets the emergent AI artists. Ep 2, 2022.

Barcelona, Spain — November 4, 2022 — On October 24, 2022, A Weekly AI Collective is born as a Twitter Spaces initiative in collaboration with Exquisite Workers. It is a space to shed light on the AI Art Movement, creators who are building it, the passion and conviction AI artists have for their medium, and NFT / blockchain technology which opens the extraordinary potential for expression, collaboration, and monetization of the digital art.

A Weekly AI Collective chooses Twitter Spaces as it is an easy way to have free live audio conversations by using your phone on Twitter, the application mostly used by the NFT Community. Up to 13 people can speak in a Space, including a Host and two Co-hosts.

AWAIC Ep. 2 with Lilyillo, Nikita Panin and 0009. Image courtesy of AWAIC.

In the second episode of the Twitter Spaces by A Weekly AI Collective we are proudly introducing the Success Stories of Lilyillo, 0009 and Nikita Panin, one of the most promising AI artists in space.

The questions that we asked the artists are:

• How you discovered the AI, when this happened and how you applied it in your creative process? What are the the tools you use and your sources of inspiration?
• What the first AI artwork you ever minted and your most favorite artwork so far and why?
• What is your secret to community building (your relation with fellow AI creators and collectors)?
• As pioneers in AI art, how do you imagine the evolution of tech in 5 years from now? And how do you imagine your artist path unveiled further?
• What would you recommend to those who are about to start their journey as AI artists in the border of 2022 and 2023? Is curation of one’s work important?

Here we introduce the guests-artists, share their work and celebrate their artistry and vision by sharing some quotes from the live conversation.

LILYILLO

Lilyillo is an artist based in Canberra, Australia. Lilyillo completed a Master’s of Fine Art majoring in drawing, Masters of Curatorial Studies and a Bachelor of Art History & Theory from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales and undertook artist residencies in Paris and Scotland. Lilyillo has exhibited work extensively Internationally, has worked for the National Association for the Visual Arts, Australia and was a director of Firstdraft Gallery Sydney. Lilyillo works across traditional and digital AI mediums, exploring concepts of identity & representation, nostalgia and memory. Lilyillo´s work can be collected on Objkt, Opensea, and on Cardano. She is a mum of two beautiful children and runs a design studio full time. Lilyillo´s submission to the second AI Art Contest by Claire Silver is called “Inlayed”.

Website of the artist — https://www.lilyillo.com/

“Inlayed”, Lilyillo´s submission to the second 2AI Art Contest by Claire Silver. Image courtesy of Lilyillo.

Lilyillo´s quotes:

“I was inspired by AI and that kind of freedom to explore without any kind of a fear, backlash and making mistakes. These tools are so young. We are here in such an infant space and we all have to embrace them as a process of play. This is really liberating and quite scary.”

“The anomalies you get in AI — really beautiful fingers different little artefacts we see that AI outputs for us — it is not always going to be like this. This is a moment in time that these artefacts will be here. AI is going to be better and those artefacts will go, and I am very sad about that.”

“Post Photography for me is a very interesting thing because you see this creation of photos of people who have not necessarily ever existed but they are birthed through AI. There is something very beautiful about that process. Susan Sontag, a photo theorist writes: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” And I think that the photo theory is a really interesting thing because photos are this “capturing of a moment in time” and the moment the traditional photo is taken, that moment in time, has passed. So it is essentially this moment when the subject is dead. Photography as we understand it is related to death in a sense of the death of that time or moment. The AI on the other hand creates and births these subjects. It is poetic.”

From left to right: Lilyillo´s watercolor, digital and AI-Assisted artworks. Images courtesy of Lilyillo.

0009

Chris Maestas, A.K.A. 0009, is a Senior Automotive Designer/Illustrator based in LA, USA. 0009 graduated from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena with a Bachelor of Science in Automotive Design/Industrial Design. Chris’s early work is centered around acrylic, oil-based enamel, spray paint, and digital pixel-pushing. Since 2022, 0009 has been deep-diving into AI-assisted exploration, inspired in subcultures, its individuality and its urge to stand out. 0009 is the author of DEFACED series, abstract representations of Graffiti, its vocabulary and set of aesthetics, introduced in the “human spaces”. He is an author of “A-I graffiti ‘’ brought from the streets to the white wall galleries. 0009´s work can be collected on Objkt, Foundation, and SuperRare. 0009 recently celebrated the successful sold-out solo exhibition of 12 pieces on Tezos (Objkt.com) at Superchief Gallery NFT, NY, USA MUSEUM SURVEY OF GRAFFITI. Between November 3 and 12, 2022 Superchief Gallery NFT is showcasing for the second time 0009´s work in the solo show in La Biennale Di Venezia. This time the arts are minted on Ethereum (Foundation).

Website of the artist - https://0-0-0-9.com/

“From a distance” by 0009 from the series MUSEUM SURVEY OF GRAFFITI (2022). Image courtesy of 0009.

0009´s quotes:

“I was feeling burnt out being in the automotive creative industry for the last 10+ years and I feel like I am a fresh graduate out of University again. I am green and ready to learn as much as I can. I feel like I have a team of the best artists and illustrators working for me that never get tired. It is an amazing collaborative tool that I am deeply in love with. I am going full speed at it.”

“When I do MidJourney it is a mix of a lot of different images that I photo-merge in Photoshop to create the composition I am looking for.”

From left to right: “cul·mi·na·tion” from the series MUSEUM SURVEY OF GRAFFITI (2022) and “social fabric” from DEFACED series (2022). Image courtesy of 0009.

0009´s work in the solo show in La Biennale Di Venezia, November 2022. Image courtesy of 0009.

NIKITA PANIN

Nikita Panin is an AI artist, a global nomad, currently based in Ubud, Indonesia. He graduated from St. Petersburg Art & Design Academy specializing in ceramics. Upon graduation his work centered around oil painting until 2019 when AI experimentation entered his artistic life. Nikita is no new to digital art. He started his digital web artwork at the age of 12 and celebrated his first digital art show when Nikita was 15 years old. Today Nikita portfolio counts with dozens of exhibitions around the world including Taiwan, Belgium, Argentina, Germany, and USA. Having amassed considerable experience over the last few years, his main research now focuses on the exploration of creative possibilities within AI. Nikita´s work can be collected on Objkt, Foundation, KnownOrigin and on SuperRare.

Website of the artist — https://itjust.is

“fragile #81” from “fragile ones” (2022) by Nikita Panin. Image courtesy of Nikita Panin.

Nikita Panin´s quotes:

“Since I was an oil painting, I was trying to make sketches for my paintings using AI and then transfering them. But I felt I was some kind of biological printer to it and dedided not to do it anymore. Once I had a nice experimentation: I have printed an AI generated image on canvas and then painted in over but completely differently. That way it was a kind of nice collaboration. When I did not have the place to paint, AI became a big helper for me to stay creative every day while using my laptop. Right now I develop my own tools, like a Photoshop plugin for Stable Difussion. I hope soon I will announce it.”

“First I was very fascinated by the imperfections and glitches of AI. For me they felt like the personal style and essence of AI, its nature. Especially back in the days it was very beautiful, now there is not so much of it. I think in future we will see the interactive movies in the style of any director. We will be able to create art using our thoughts, maybe even Metaverses, we will see many things that we cannot think about now and which will surprise us very much.”

“I cannot choose my favorite work. They are all like my children.”

Nikita Panin´s AI-Assisted artworks. Images courtesy of Nikita Panin.

“In my Genesis on SuperRare called “neo genesis” I explore a classic theme fraught with many interpretations, both mythological and metaphysical — Virgin Mary and a Child. In this artwork I used ceramics and porcelain artistic aesthetics, personal laws of composition arrangement and favorite symbolic elements I’ve developed and adapted over years. And it all combined with SD interpolation technique + a bit of audioreactive procedural animation. Music is generated with an AI I’ve trained on my all time favorite music. With the evolvement and development of AI tools there is a lot more control over composition and everything than before, so it becomes truly AI collaborative.”

Nikita Panin´s “neo-genesis” on SuperRare. The piece is animated and has sound. Image courtesy of Nikita Panin.

At the end of the Twitter Spaces we opened the Space for questions from the audience. Among them:

• Tell us about your genesis on SuperRare (for 0009 and Nikita Panin)?
• What helps you keep the work-life balance?
• How do you get AI to generate darker skin tones, if it’s a difficult bias to overcome (for Lilyillo)?

Listen to the Twitter Spaces via this link. The duration is 1:29 min. Language: English (please turn on the captions if needed). For more refer to the supporting thread on Anna Dart´s Twitter account.

Caption from AWAIC Ep 2: co-hosts, guests and listeners. Image courtesy of Anna Dart.

Quote from Anna Dart:

“Entering the Metaverse it is up to us to shape its culture. In a time of change and disruption creators shall be the ambassadors of the cultural legacies to contribute to the development of the heritage of tomorrow. We are creators for creators, and we are passionately building a new art industry that belongs to the artists, those who never forget where they come from. We are here to enable everyone to express this potential and create everlasting eternally rewarding connections and structures.”

Thanks so much to everyone who made the AWAIC Ep 2 possible. Special thanks to Roger Haus and Pamela Corals for the tech-assistance. And thanks to you for reading. If you find this article useful, please consider sharing with your favorite AI friends and fellow AI communities. They will love it!

Want to tune in to the upcoming A Weekly AI Collective Twitter Spaces?

It is easy! The special guest of the next Twitter Spaces is Francien Kreig AI who will be interviewed by Vinny Scorsatto. Click on this link. Set a reminder. Prepare the questions. See you then!

Would like to try the AI tools and do not know where to start?

No problem! We invite you to explore the AI tool Box by Time Traveller AI. It is a thoughtful thread on Twitter which covers the major AI tools such as DALL-E 2, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion (with prompts and examples of outcomes). 🔥