After thinking a bit about what it means for something to count as internet or digital art, I remembered one of the projects that Aven Le Zhou (who is faculty at NYUSH and teaches Interactive Machine Learning) did sometime ago called “Shanshui DaDA”
As Aven describes it, “Shanshui-DaDA” is an interactive installation based on artificial intelligence. When participants scribble lines and sketch the landscape, the AI will help to create a Chinese Shanshui painting.”
The literal meaning of “Shan Shui” is “Mountain Water” and it depicts scenery using brushes and inks and often has mountains, rivers and waterfalls as prominent elements of the project.
What Shanshui DaDa allows you to do is create your own Shanshui style paintings. You draw on an interface and the machine learning mechanisms translate the sketches into a Shanshui sketch.
Here’s a video demo of the interaction:
And, here’s some of the Shanshui paintings that were generated by the model.
The reason why I think that this is a really interesting project is because of the fact that it is sort of a fusion of traditional practice meets cutting-edge contemporary techniques and it empowers those as users to generate new and seemingly unpredictable designs. Furthermore, it also enables those with zero or very little art experience to delve into art creation in some sense.