A work from Sarin’s veGAN project, combining a richly colored artificial lettuce leaf with a grid of black, white and red latentDoodles. The image brings her food photography, GAN experiments and visual wordplay into a single digital collage.
Provenance
Minted by Helena Sarin as NeuralBricolage on hic et nunc, 1 October 2021. Tezos token 380853, issued in 11 copies.
“Latenttuce” joins lettuce with latent space, the learned space of possibilities within a generative model; the red “pepper flakes” turn the act of composition into a culinary joke.
Sarin’s original token description identifies a chain of AI models trained on lettuce photographs she took herself, dressed with latentDoodles, and places the work in the veGAN project and The Book of veGAN. Its method extends her established practice of joining several models and arranging their results into a finished image. The photograph supplies training material for an invented plant, while the added doodles introduce a second visual vocabulary. The Etopia exhibition catalogue describes related latentDoodles works as generated with SNGAN models trained on her sketches, arranged in grids and processed through CycleGAN. These motifs recur across her work, forming a recognizable part of her visual vocabulary.
Minted in October 2021, the work belongs to the period when an already developed GAN practice found a new audience through hic et nunc and the Tezos art community. Its importance within Sarin’s oeuvre is as a concentrated example of her approach to authorship: she supplies the source imagery, shapes the model pipeline and constructs the final composition.