My World

Hello all!

My name is Sebastian Evans. I am a studio art major, and a senior here at Lawrence.

My major was actually not decided until the latter half of last year, stemming from my lack of inspiration in my previous field of study (linguistics), and a newfound love of photography.

I remember always being fascinated with the act of "recording" as a child. I would make use of cassette tape recorders, DV tape recorders, and digital cameras to obsessively document the mundanities of everyday life. I remember specifically that the idea of freezing a visual moment in time was magical to me.

In my early teen years, I participated in an "urban photography" camp that, while inspiring, would mark the last of my photographic exploits for some time. 

Through most of my high school years, distracted by schoolwork and my burgeoning adulthood, I did not make much exploration of the visual arts.

It was not until I took a film photography course here at Lawrence that my dormant passion finally resurfaced. 

I began exploring as many different photographic ideas as I could, from portraiture:




to city-scape:




to long exposure.







Lately, I have become fascinated with the implications of machines on the artist's work process, and art itself. McLuhan's assertion that "... electrical circuitry [is] an extension of the central nervous system." stood out to me in that regard. Artificial intelligence is making strides in its production of musical, visual, and written "arts", and it is able to reproduce human-like art with increasing fidelity. It is, of course, always with human aid that these artworks are realized. Like the pen and the brush, neural networks and machine learning are used by artists to create a type of visual that is hard to imagine existing without some computational influence. 

So-called language models such as OpenAI's GPT-3 have displayed an astonishing ability to generate unique text that mimics the writing of a human. This "understanding" of language, as learned by reading hundreds of billions of words from the internet, has lent itself to a surprising versatility. One demo was created in which the model took a plain English input, and outputted a visual according to the description. Is this the future of art?:


As artificial intelligence generalizes, will there come a point at which machines are able to create art of their own volition, and could these creations truly be considered art?

This is something that I hope to interrogate in my future work, and it is something I hope to observe firsthand as our reality becomes ever more submerged in the world of machines.


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