The work, which has 148 million pixels, was built up out of almost 170,000 separate parts of Rembrandt’s work.
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“You could say that we used technology and data like Rembrandt used his paints and his brushes to create something new”, suggests Ron Augustus of Microsoft.
After establishing Rembrandt’s unique talent for depicting human emotion, the team used the data to determine the subject of the new painting.
Nevertheless, art historian Gary Schwartz told the Guardian the project is “a fascinating exercise in connoisseurship”. “It’s more about trying to predict what he would do next on the basis of data”.
We examined the entire collection of Rembrandt’s work, studying the contents of his paintings pixel by pixel.
The result, even on the page, is very impressive and shows a truly new way in which we can interact with art. The project was originally created by J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam for ING bank. “The outcome was highly unsure and unpredictable”.
“If you steal from one author it is plagiarism; if you steal from many authors it is research”.
The Next Rembrandt project has proven that the line between computer and human-generated art is easily blurred and whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen. “And I think that’s the most unbelievable thing that I’ve encountered”. The first step to making The Next Rembrandt, was analyzing all 346 of Rembrandt’s paintings using high resolution 3D scans and digital files, which were upscaled by a deep learning algorithm. Breaking down the demographics of Rembrandt’s subjects revealed that the painter mostly painted – unsurprisingly – white men between the ages of 30 and 40 who wore dark clothes with a white collar and were turned slightly to the viewer’s right. Facial recognition software was also employed to boost the portrait’s authenticity. “And we did that for all facial features, and after that, we assembled those facial features using the geometrical dimensions that Rembrandt used to use in his own work”. It was then hooked up to a 3D printer that became the artificial artist’s medium, laying down 13 layers of “paint-based UV ink” in a way that mimics not only the layout and palette of a Rembrandt but also the three-dimensional physical structure of the painting.
The painting was officially unveiled in Amsterdam on Tuesday and will be soon on public display at a yet-to-be-determined location. Art historians, according to Korsten, have already suggested the possibility of adopting this technology to restore paintings – using what he describes as “predictive modeling” to recreate lost fragments of works. “And can you actually create something out of it that looks like Rembrandt?” “But we had to feed him with the creativity of Rembrandt”.
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Together with Rembrandt experts the demographic segmentation of the people in these portraits was defined.
