150 dannydevos Blocks in Colour is a derivative of Text-to-Image, a series of images generated by an Artificial Intelligence ‘Machine Learning Model’ from DeepAI.

‘Machine learning’ is a field of study within artificial intelligence that deals with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instructions.

A ‘Machine Learning Model’ is a type of mathematical model that, after being ‘trained’ on a given dataset, can be used to make predictions or classifications on new data. During training, a learning algorithm iteratively adjusts the model’s internal parameters to minimise errors in predictions.

A ‘Text-to-Image’ model is a machine-learning model that takes a natural language description as input and produces an image corresponding to that description.

On 12 December 2021, I used his first name and surname, without capital letters (danny devos), as a description to generate two digital images. Over the next nine months, I repeated that operation almost daily to generate one, two, three or no images per day: usually, the given description produces images of abstract spaces. The fictional abstract spaces resemble places where performances could take place.

The last generated image dates from 8 August 2022. From the day after, the AI model has discovered or learned that ‘danny devos’ is a person and should generate a portrait rather than images of three-dimensional spaces. All digital images are published daily on one of my Instagram accounts (@textoimage), and they can all also be found on my website here.

At a later stage, I used 3D software to convert the two-dimensional images into three-dimensional objects that can be printed on a 3D printer.