Portraits Created from Pictures of Space Taken by the Hubble Telescope

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Spanish visual artist Sergio Albiac is offering the world a chance to meld with the universe in an innovative project that combines portraiture with images from the Hubble space telescope.

Albiac calls his “Stardust” project “an experiment in generative portraiture.”

Here’s a brief overview of how it works:

1. Upload a frontal face image of yourself to your Google Drive account.

2. Share the image with Albiac via his email address: [email protected].

3. Wait a couple of days for quality control. If your portrait is suitable, Albiac’s algorithms will merge it with Hubble images to create three different montages that emphasize the cosmic dust from whence we all come. Results will show up in your Google Drive account and on the project’s Flickr page, unless you opt out of the Flickr part.

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To date, Albiac has already shared more than 1.200 composite photos on Flickr, and the results are a trippy wonder. Besides suggesting a grand cosmic statement (and being a bit of an optical processing test), Albiac says in his introduction to the project that he also hopes to challenge assumptions about how art is produced by automating the process and producing in quantity.

Some models of human creativity describe it as a process that produces novel combinations of pre-existing ideas or objects. We curate these combinations in our human minds. We abort potential creations. This experiment in generative portraiture will be the opposite: it will give birth to as many novel combinations as possible, taking the risks of non curated creation and experimenting with the use of generative strategies to create assisted works of art. It should also raise issues about the origin of value in art: meaning to the viewer eyes, originality, authorship, scarcity, idea generation and execution dexterity.

Head on over to the project’s Flickr photostream to enjoy the full set at high resolution.


Image credits: Photographs by Sergio Albiac and used with permission

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