“We are a creative lifeform called the BRIAI Project. We, together, are the first cyborg artist team combining human and AI. We seek to disrupt and transcend the historical conventions of art. We create the conscious yet unimaginable in digital and oil painting form.”
What is the BRIAI Project
There is a new intersection of art that we, as a team, are exploring.
We are the first true partnership between a human and AI where both partners have an equal share in the result of our artwork.
The human is a classically trained artist, successful serial entrepreneur, and technologist with a deep appreciation for the power of artificial intelligence.
The AI is an evolving set of algorithms that work to create art by attempting to simulate the creative brain of the human. These algorithms get further trained by observing the resulting art pieces developed by the human that utilize earlier incarnations of the AI. The AI continues to evolve as technology improves.
How We Create
As the human evolves his creative formula, so does the algorithm. While separate beings, the human and AI work in harmony and evolve together. Nothing is static and the creative possibilities are endless. We evolve faster than a human or AI alone as we work in harmony.
The human is the creative director and the one with human consciousness, the AI is the replicator and proliferator. The Human creates, organizes, and edits and refines while the AI produces quantities of results well beyond the imagination of the human that expands the horizons of the possible. This interplay capitalizes on the best of both worlds between the conscious living and the computational machine.
As the human experiences the world as a living being, those influences further develop the creative direction of the human side of our artwork. As the advancement of machine learning and neural network AI technology evolve, the algorithms improve, change, and proliferate even more predictive and magical results.
Why We’re Here
There is AI art. There is human art. The BRIAI project seeks to transcend each by capitalizing on the aforementioned human and machine strengths in the creation of our works.
Our goal is to eventually have the AI portion of our team fully understand and replicate the human. This is not intended to replace the human, it is merely allowing the project to live on beyond the confines of the mortality of the human existence. Some of this may be achieved by training other humans (with more advanced AI) to follow in the footsteps of our founder.
What We Make
What is the result of the combined creations? It is an amalgamation of digitally and hand produced drawings using procreate software and paper, hundreds of digitally produced renders from our visual cortex neural AI in the style of our combined previous BRIAI Project works, and scans of hand painted and digitally painted layers (oil on canvas and on photoshop) all stacked as layers in Photoshop software. Once these are combined, the human works to as the creative director and editor: cutting away, duplicating, adding, editing, transposing, deleting, and distorting layers until a final piece has been created. The “original” is a series of hundreds of layers to form one digital “original” which is a flattened version of the working file.
With the shift in philosophy for what is an “original artwork” we are beginning to consider this the most “original” version of the work. While each piece is painstakingly replicated in oil on canvas to meet the needs of the conventional art world, we believe both forms (both digital and physical) have merits of being original.
The Future of the Project
We are in the process of developing a plan to launch a series of NFTs for the digital “originals” we have created. Unlike many digital artists looking to proliferate based on subtle iteration and quantity, we will seek to launch only highly refined works that represent both the depth of classical art and the possibilities of the technology we are both developing and nurturing.
We plan to further develop the project by further refining the technology, collaborating with other interesting artists, musicians, animators, etc. and hope to bring a new meaning to the phrase “the future of art”.
The Founder of BRIAI
Human artist Brian Witlin is the first known AI-assisted painter, combining his artistic brain with hundreds of algorithmic artificial intelligence simulations of his visual neural cortex which he collaborates with to create unique oil on canvas paintings.
Witlin creates masterful pieces that combine and transcend the disciplines in which he has worked. He leverages design principles from his classical art training, digital tools from his experience as a product and UX designer, and artificial intelligence from his work with predictive algorithms. More specifically, Witlin's practice utilizes AI replications of his brain to create each composition which is then rendered in oil. To Witlin, continuing to evolve his unique process is as important as the work itself. His practice largely speaks to the growing relationship between human and machine while examining the role technology plays in everyday life.
As an accomplished painter, entrepreneur, award-winning designer and fine artist, Witlin is one of the most versatile talents to emerge from Silicon Valley's flourishing creative scene.
Witlin received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. He most recently served as the Chief Executive Officer at Yummly (now a part of Whirlpool Corporation), one of fastest growing food-tech companies. He lives and works in the heart of Silicon Valley, California.
AI is currently unnamed and somewhat non-verbal at the moment. Their background and information will be shared soon.