Baden Pailthorpe

One and Three PCs, 2019 

Digital imagery produced by a DCGAN machine learning algorithm, various LED screens, InWin Z Tower, Threadripper 2970WX, ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha, G.Skill Trident Z RGB 64GB, 2 x AMD Radeon VII, 2 x WD Black 1TB NVMe, ASUS ROG Thor 1200W Platinum, Thermaltake Riing Trio, CableMod Pro Sleeved Cables, Custom 7″ screen (running Aida64)

PC build: Stuart Tonks, GGF LAN Party
AI assistance: Dr Charles Gretton, ANU; Kieran Browne, ANU
Network architecture by Radford et al., 2015.   

Code:  https://github.com/gsurma/image_generator  
Supported by: InWin

Baden Pailthorpe's One and Three PCs (2019) is a computational installation comprised of the world's most beautiful computer attempting to produce and recognise an image of itself. Using a form of image generating AI called a Deep Convolutional General Adversarial Network (DCGAN), this installation playfully calls into question the meaning of language, symbols and imagery in the context of machine intelligence.

Produced for The Invisible Hand, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney

Procedural/Portrait

8 mins 33 seconds / 6-channel digital video, 1920 x 6840 pixels. Installation view, Lyon Housemuseum Galleries, Melbourne, 2019

Credits: James Peter Brown (Composer)

Antoine Roille (Programmer)

Supported by: Lyon Foundation, Sullivan+Strumpf

Procedural/Portrait is a 6-channel animation ‘portrait’ of the Housemuseum Galleries, a newly built private museum in Melbourne, Australia. This artwork was commissioned on the occasion of it's inagrual exhibition, 'ENTER'.

Using the museum’s 3D architectural models, Pailthorpe plays with digital patterns that disrupt, expand and collapse the gallery spaces as they float over a simulated version of the Western Victorian Volcanic Plains, the ancient source of the Housemuseum's Bluestone material.

Clanger, a solo exhibition at UTS Art, Sydney, explores the aesthetics of power through data, bodies and technology. In an environment that is both physical and virtual, Clanger pairs the statistical tracking of AFL player performance with the emotional intensities of the crowd.

Using anonymous player and crowd data captured during the 2017 AFL Round 23 Swans v Carlton game, Clanger re-stages the drama and flow of a match in its entirety. Pailthorpe moves the game from the field to the virtual plane, rendering both players and the crowd as data-borne creations caught in a deeply emotional, cultural and aesthetic tradition.

In statistical terms, the word ‘Clanger’ refers to a turnover or a silly mistake made by a player in an AFL match. The criteria for each player’s usefulness is defined wholly by the data they generate during the game— AFL players are tracked using micro wearable units that include GPS and accelerometers. The amount of data generated from these devices in a given game is immense; every movement is tracked, stored and interpreted in an effort to understand performance, mitigate injury and measure value.

By adopting the vernaculars of sport and gaming, the artist creates an immersive environment that emphasises the role of experience in the propagation of labour, culture, and ideas. A new 36-channel video work re-articulates the match using the two team’s GPS data, while a single-channel video work on the opposing end of the gallery/field renders the crowd via audio data captured at the game. A soundtrack by composer James Brown accompanies this work. By pairing the compelling languages of creative practice with the statistics of player performance, Pailthorpe’s Clanger demonstrates that data becomes information only by interpretation.

Clanger results from Pailthorpe’s Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) 2017 Synapse Artist Residency with UTS Sport and Exercise Science and professor Aaron Coutts. The exhibition is supported by a catalogue essay by Dr Dan Golding, lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology; co-author of Game Changers: From Minecraft to Misogyny, The Fight for the Future of Videogames (Affirm Press, 2016).

Read the full text of “The Rules of The Crowd” by Dan Golding here.

Photos: Jessica Maurer

Baden Pailthorpe's 2017 exhibition Pitch Deck combines elements of high quality 3D animation, custom gaming PCs, liquid cooling, roman armour, web scrapers, champagne and startup chic.
 
A 'pitch deck' is a visual presentation to provide a brief business plan overview to potential investors, partners and customers. Pailthorpe's Pitch Deck is formed around a real company, Petricore Pty Ltd., who borrow key principles of conceptual art – privileging concepts over material form and challenging conventions of artwork authorship. This new body of work explores the potential application of financial analysis and machine learning in contemporary art, and is conceived as a pitch to potential investors in a business based on cultural capital.

Pailthorpe's title work, a major new 3D animation, serves as an expanded moving image pitch whose artificially intelligent narrator outlines Petricore’s vision for an art world inoculated against the risks of art world participation. Alongside this major new work, are three new digital sculptures; Padding, Helmet and Incubator, that display speculative merchandise and environments to accompany the central startup pitch.
 
In the algorithmically intense stages of late-capitalism, after the supposed death of the avant garde, Pitch Deck asks us to consider whether today’s aesthetic and conceptual innovators have been absorbed by incubators rather than studios, funded by the interests of venture capitalists rather than patrons.

COLLECTIONS

Private collections

EXHIBITED

2018

Kuiper Projects, Brisbane

Move on Asia 2018: Digital Art in a Post-Digital Asia, Alternative Space Loop & Daegu Art Factory, Seoul, South Korea.

2017    

Sullivan+Strumpf, Singapore.

Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney, Australia.

Alt-Right Arabesque

2016

960 x 960 pixels, 3 mins

Ed. 5 + 2 AP.

Composer: James Brown

COLLECTIONS

Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne

Private Collections

EXHIBITED

2016    

Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia

F-35 (Seaquest), 2015

HD 3D animation, color, sound

Edition of 5 + 2AP

MQ-9 Reaper I - III

2014 - 2016

COLLECTIONS

Australian Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bathurst

UQ Art Museum, Brisbane

Private collections

Cadence (series)

2013

HD video, colour, stereo sound, 4 mins / 6 mins.

Edition of 5 + 2 AP.

COLLECTIONS

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (All)

Australian War Memorial (Cadence I)

Newcastle Art Gallery (Cadence II-IV)

Private Collections (All)

EXHIBITED

2017   

A Broken Link, Golden Age Cinema, Sydney & Central St. Martins, London.

Red Green Blue: A History of Australian Video Art, Grifith University Art Gallery, Brisbane.

2016    

GAME/ART VIDEO, Triennale di Milano, Italy.

2015    

Theatres, Perth International Arts Festival, Museum of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

Guarding the Home Front, Casula Powerhouse, Liverpool, Australia.

2014

Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.

Cadence, Westspace, Melbourne, Australia.

2013    

Cadence, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney, Australia.

Permanent Collection, The Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia.

New Atlantis, km temporaer, Berlin, Germany. Curated by Elisa R Linn / Lennart Wolff.

Spatial Operations

2015

210 paper helmets created from each book on the Australian Chief of Army's Reading List.

PVA, cellulose powder, paper pulp. 24.0 x 30.0 x 22.0cm (each), 210 pieces

COLLECTIONS

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

Private Collections

EXHIBITED

2016     

Sappers and Shrapnel, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

2015    

Spatial Operations, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney.

Spatial Operations, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle.

2014

Students of War, Centre Pompidou, Paris (performance)