Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son redrawn by Twitter user @clayhor using the Corporate Memphis illustration style (2020).
The best example of “style transfer” is not done with artificial intelligence, it is not the ghiblization of a banal selfie but the hand-made rendering in “flat style” (also called Corporate Memphis) of a Goya painting. The vector Saturn devouring his son is more blunt and profound than any output of OpenAI’s anime engine because it is not a simple stylization but a reflection on the logic of stylization, that is, on its conceptual innovation, which for some is violence or imposture. The flat Saturn shows us how the corporate imagination infantilizes reality, producing a flattening of signs, contexts, and registers into a generic “niceness” á la Google/Alphabet. The point is not that synthetic images are right-wing (although it is well possible to add a cutesy touch to photos of deportations), but rather that they are transversal in a totalitarian and totalizing way, universal as multiculturalism has been, that is, according to a very partial idea of the universe, thus both oleographic and stylized, but always within the shifting parametric boundary of the stylized and the oleographic.
The generation of an image “in the style of” is therefore a triumph: the triumph of postmodern vertigo, pastiche elevated to the syntactic level; and I do not say this as an accusation: there is indeed something exciting and somewhat liberating about this new technical possibility. But it would be unfair to deny a sense of loss. In a few days all this has become normal, and we already struggle to remember the time when that vase of sunflowers always corresponded only to those dense brushstrokes – as if they were two separable entities, save through an artificial caesura… there it is, I already think in the “paratactic” terms of style transfer, that is, I conceive formal features and content elements as a list or summation. It’s a new archaic style: warrior’s body + death = the same body placed horizontally. The question then becomes: what hypotaxis could be in the times of style transfer, that is, what other operations are possible besides addition – assuming they are possible. We talk about future and revolution, but we have ended up, who knows how, in the time of myth.