I’ve come to learn that if a person can run neural networks and has deep interest in art, they are probably a pretty creative and interesting person. Australian artist Liam Ellul is no exception.

Ellul recently shared a new portrait series he working on called Just Tell Me Who To Be on Twitter. His portraits are simultaneously of nobody in particular and yet also everybody in his life. The series explores identity through four 12”x12” acrylic-on-cotton paintings. Each painting was painted directly on printouts of images Ellul created by training a GAN (generative adversarial network) on 10k photographs from his Facebook account.

Without going into a full description of how GANs work (you can find that here), the process involves a neural network inventing new images based on a set of training images provided by the artist. So in Ellul’s case, he is essentially asking the GAN, “If I give you photos of all the important people and moments in my life, can you go and invent me some new people and moments?” After training, the GAN outputs a large number of potential images and stores them in “latent space,” which you can see in the animated GIF below.