For our group, one of the hardest things for us was to decide what to document, so instead we focused on finding a backdrop found interesting. Because we didn’t go into the project with a very clear idea, starting either of the manual collages was difficult but we found some meaning part way through the process. For me, the most interesting thing was looking back on the collages and interpreting what they could mean. For instance, the physical collage we put together starts out very linear as it progresses from top to bottom, but when it gets closer, she starts to move off to the left and he falters but then follows suit, and this could go off and tell an interesting story about their relationship (if they had one).

Of our three, I find the Photoshop manual collage is most appealing and best documents the original photo shoot where he stopped to tie his shoes. Photoshop was not capable of making artistic decisions for our set of photographs, perhaps because we had only one perspective and an identical backdrop for each one. For some groups it was successful, but overall people didn’t seem as happy with how it turned out compared to the pieces they created.

Hockney is not thrilled with the advances made in Photoshop because he feels that the long labor of love that went into chemical photography does not translate to the computer. I feel that Photoshop as a tool is really interesting in creating Hockney-inspired work, but I do not think that an algorithm that assists in the production of this is worthy of being noted as a co-creator. If a piece is fully generated by AI or similar programs, it is still guided by the input of a human and in this scenario, I would say that the AI should be noted as a co-creator unless the human who input the information was also the creator of the computer program.

Photomerge Function on Photoshop

Physical Collage

Manual Collage in Photoshop