SCOTT BENZEL

Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, video projection, generative adversarial net trained on the work of Justinus Kerner, Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Hermann Rorschach, part of Drive-by Art, organized by Warren Neidich, Renee Petropoulos, Michael Slenske, and Anuradha Vikram

Justinus Kerner’s mid-late 19th C Kleksographien, ‘automatic’ drawings derived from inkblots, relied on the projection of the artist’s and viewers’ imagination onto forms ‘revealed’ in the ink.  Similar techniques were employed by the artists and writers Victor Hugo and George Sand, today considered proto-abstractionists. Kerner’s quasi-mystical interpretation of the process was superseded in the 1890’s by the psychologists Alfred Binet and Victor Henri’s ‘scientific’ interpretation, which suggested that the presence of recognizable images in the blots was the result of ‘involuntary imagination’. Hermann Rorschach, then a medical student training under Jung’s teacher, the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, fully operationalized the process with the creation of his inkblot test as a tool to uncover a subject’s unconscious desires and ‘projections’.

In Kleksografienprojektion, 2020, a Machine Learning model trained on the work of Kerner, Hugo, Sand, and Rorschach generates a flowing field of interpolated imagery.  Figures and images emerge and recede as a process of projection occurs both in the algorithm- a StyleGAN derivation designed to seek out relationships between images- and the human viewer watching the projected image.

StyleGAN training by Dongpu Ling; Produced by Olivia Mole; Thank you Asha Bukojemsky, Hailey Loman, Michael Slenske, and Warren Neidich