RW: Finding Jesus via AI
Remember When: AI finds artistic common ground in views of Jesus
Remember When: AI finds artistic common ground in views of Jesus.
Dutch designer and photographer Bas Uterwijk recreates historical faces by feeding thousands of art-based images into a machine-learning web app called Artbreeder.
The AI spots common denominators in the source data, and generates photo-realistic images based upon those common denominators.
When provided with numerous Byzantine and Renaissance-era depictions of Jesus, adapted for cultural accuracy, the app generated a photo-realistic approximation of those common denominators. The result, first released in 2019:
Bas Uterwijk (@ganbrood) • Instagram photos and videos
On Instagram, Uterwijk described his process:
When I was playing around with several cultural depictions of Jesus of Nazareth of Byzantine and Renaissance origin including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi”, and the Turin Shroud. Tweaking the ethnicity to a more convincing Middle-Eastern face. I was happy with the result as a representation of a collective cultural depiction but at the same time I felt it lacked any historical accuracy. So I changed the hair and beard to a more credible length and style for the time and region and I brought in elements found in some #Fayum mummy portraits, pushing the renaissance art to the background. The result is a artistic impression of how this man could have looked, more than it is a scientific search for an exact likeness.
Uterwijk is first to acknowledge that this depiction is not based upon archaeology or historical documentation. Instead, it summarizes and adjusts available artistic depictions, and adjusts for known cultural practices.
This process is very different, for example, from that of Richard Neave and the Israeli archaeologists who recreated Forensic Jesus.
Find Bas Uterwijk on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.