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Golan Levin, Ambigrammatic Figure #0073 (2020)

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Stewarded Collection: a2p, Spring 2020
full screen
Medium

Image

Edition

Edition of 10

Created

2020

Issued

19 April 2020 on Bitmark, asset 326c6e057e5b…

Provenance

Re-minted on Ethereum in 2025 as a2p-v2: 11 of 11 editions (contract)

Stewarded Collection
Released by

a2p

Blockchain

ethereum (migrated from Bitmark)

By Golan Levin with Lingdong Huang. Developed at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry during the COVID-19 pandemic of March 2020. This grotesque face is an "ambigram": an image that is legible both upside-down and right-side up. It may be displayed in any orientation. Some of the finest works of this kind are the "Upside-down Pictures" by Edo illustrator Utagawa Yoshitora (active 1836–1887), and a series of "Reversible Faces" published posthumously by the British artist, Rex Whistler (1905–1944). Face ambigrams have been extensively documented in George Tscherny's 2004 book, "Changing Faces". "Ambigrammatic Figure #0073" was synthesized with the StyleGAN2 generative adversarial network, and optimized using pre-trained weights from the Flickr-Faces-HQ Dataset. The machine's hallucination was alchemically influenced by the faces of individuals in NIST Special Database 18, to whom we acknowledge our debt. No resemblance to actual persons is intended or should be inferred.

Editions, as the exchange left them on the Bitmark chain

  • AP Golan Levin
  • 1/10 Mario Klingemann
  • 2/10 Cao Shu
  • 3/10 Weiyi Li
  • 4/10 Curime Batliner
  • 5/10 R. Luke DuBois
  • 6/10 Memo Akten
  • 7/10 Chris Coleman
  • 8/10 Sam Lavigne
  • 9/10 Tega Brain
  • 10/10 Allison Parrish
Ambigrammatic Figure #0073 by Golan Levin