The year is coming to an end and some events for 2023 are already being launched, among them the pioneering Sónar festival in Barcelona.
Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the festival will take place from 15th to 17th June (tickets will be available from Monday 5th December at sonar.es), in the meantime, organisers revealed the partial programme, releasing the names of the first 66 artists that will join this edition of the festival (View this photo).
The idea for Sónar 2023 is celebrating a wide range of electronic music and a rich diversity of sounds, from dance-floor beats to exploratory experimental sounds, including Bicep, the duo that went from dance music bloggers to playing stadium gigs, house and disco acts Peggy Gou, Honey Dijon and The Blessed Madonna, Amelie Lens' acid techno, multi-talented producer Oneohtrix Point Never, geneticist-turned-musician Max Cooper and legendary Japanese visual and sound artist Ryoji Ikeda.
The festival also released a visual campaign that perfectly follows the event's legacy of unconventional approaches to branding.
Designed by visual artist and Sónar co-director Sergio Caballero, the campaign was made with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The campaign reflects on the festival's ongoing commitment to including visual arts in its programme and connecting arts, culture, music and technology, removing barriers and forging connections between audiences, genres and creative disciplines.
As next year's edition of the festival marks a special anniversary, the campaign was created by feeding the AI with images from the past 30 years of visual campaigns.
Sergio Caballero, co-director of Sónar, explained in a press release: "The AI has carried out 29 training sessions, each one of them based on a visual campaign from the festival's history. In seeking to acquire the ability to generate images that could fit into each of these campaigns, the AI trains itself and generates a multitude of trial and error results. It is in the beauty of these errors that Sónar has found the image for its 30th anniversary."
The result is interesting, bizarre and at times disquieting: some images are more abstract and feature mysterious ghosts and creatures that may be defined as alien mushrooms maybe; others feature human beings, but the AI came up with some very unusual solutions, collaging bits and pieces of several faces into one face, integrating a random hand where it shouldn't have been or melting objects into bodies.
And yet the results of the campaign make you think: will Artificial Intelligence start being used also in fashion for advertising campaigns?
Will it do better than campaigns directed, styled and shot by human beings (well, how could it do worse than Balenciaga's recent controversial campaigns?)?
It is undeniable that such a campaing would have a few benefits for a brand: first and foremost, it would reduce time, as you wouldn't need to bring large teams in one place/city to shoot the campaign; besides, it would cut costs as it would reduce the number of people working on a campaign, even though a brand would still need a team that could come up with the concept behind the AI generated artwork and graphic artists to maybe do changes and improve the final images.
Besides, in case the AI produced human figures, it would bring on the scene something more subtle - new canons of beauty. So far we have seen a cover made using the Artificial Intelligence for Cosmopolitan in June this year, but that image showed an illustration, in the case of Sónar instead, some of the images created by the AI display humanity in all its imperfections or humans as hybrid creatures, at times with limbs that seem to melt together with the environment surrounding the person portrayed, or people with rather grotesque faces.
Horrific? Maybe. Horrid? Well, depends. But you can bet the AI will enter the world of fashion adverts next year, after all, blaming the AI will be easier than blaming the photographer or the set designer like Balanciaga wanted to do in the recent controversy.
Besides, copyrights of the images generated by the AI in question would return to the fashion house using the AI, unless the artist(s) elaborating the images after the AI developed them, worked on them and modified them enough to be able to claim their copyright.
So will Artificial Intelligence shape the future of advertising with brands and fashion houses employing it for illustration-style images or for photographs featuring AI generated humans? Will it reduce costs or increase them? Besides, which brands/houses will be the first to opt for an AI based advertising campaign (Balenciaga? Diesel? Prada?)?
Who knows, maybe we will get some answers and suggestions at Sónar+D, the annual event that Sónar dedicates to professionals from across the creative industries. This year, it will offer a special morning programme of masterclasses, lectures, demonstrations and meetings with a day dedicated to innovation in music, and another on the relationships between art, technology, science and society with the possibility of exploring Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) tools and prototype creative technologies.
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