Swimming pool at the Capitole, tram at La Grave… With AI, he imagines a delirious Toulouse as real as nature
By Thibaut Calatayud
Published on
You can really do anything with a computer. A Toulouse, Leonce Bontemps, a pastel artist based in the Saint-Cyprien district, proves it to us. With an artificial intelligence (AI), he created a damn delusional imaginary Pink City.
He creates with an AI
To carry out his project, the Toulouse artist used the software SLAB. Named in a nod to the famous Catalan painter Salvador Dali, this AI allows you to give free rein to your imagination.
Thanks to the keywords typed in the search box, DALL-E will query its huge bank of images and photos. With these shots, she will generate a new image: “A sort of agglomeration of everything she has found”.
“I discovered this tool and I said to myself: it’s crazy, it’s like when I paint, I can literally do whatever I want. If I want to see a guy walking a pig on a leash with a pineapple on his head, it’s possible! And as I like to paint Toulouse, the first thing I chose was to have fun with the emblematic monuments of my city. »
A delirious Toulouse
After the pig, Léonce Bontemps and DALL-E attacked Toulouse. And the result is incredible. We can see, for example, a huge basin on the Place du Capitole, a futuristic tram that passes near the Dôme de la Grave or a completely revisited Saint-Sernin basilica.
“For me, no doubt, it’s art”
Can we say that these works are art? “Personally, I absolutely do not consider myself an artist in the production of these images”, admits Léonce Bontemps. He considers himself to be only a “user of fashionable technology”.
“For me, on the one hand, there are thousands of authors who took the shots that feed the AI, and on the other, there is the work of the people who developed the AI itself. Me, I only arrive at the end of the chain, I am the user.”
Nevertheless, if he does not consider himself to be the artist on this one, the 33-year-old pastellist believes that “the result comes fiercely close to what is considered a work of art according to the canons of our era. For me, no doubt, it is art”.
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