25 Andys | Searching for Vincent
Bas Uterwijk uses neural networks to construct photographs that have never been recorded with a real camera. Portraits of people who lived before the camera was invented or of people who never existed. For the Noorderlicht Festival, he reconstructed two portraits based on data: of Andy Warhol and Vincent van Gogh. The introduction of Photoshop in 1987 marked the end of photography as the ultimate visual evidence. In that same year, Andy Warhol died – who was famous for reusing pop culture images in his work. In ‘25 Andys’, Uterwijk uses Warhol’s face in an ironic meta-commentary on realism and originality.
There is only one known photographic portrait of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), in which he is nineteen years old. By uploading more than 40 portraits of the painter to a neural network, Uterwijk attempts to get as close as possible to what Van Gogh may have looked like just before his death. In ‘Searching for Vincent’, he uses algorithms and subjective interpolation of Van Gogh’s (self-)portraits in an attempt to reconstruct a face that has been a mystery for over a century.
