Artwork using AI wins $10,000 in the Brisbane Portrait Prize

Is it art if it has been made using AI? One of the winning works in the Brisbane Portrait Prize 2024 tackles this question face-on.

Serial Copycat by Brisbane artist Dennis McCart has been announced as the winner of the $10,000 Digital Award, which is the second-most lucrative prize in the annual competition.

Serial Copycat by Dennis McCart has won $10,000 in the Brisbane Portrait Prize.

A self-portrait consisting of 15 images, Serial Copycat used a program called Runway ML to merge photographs of McCart and photographs of early 20th-century artists whose images are out of copyright.

McCart said the AI images were subsequently reprocessed by hand “to reclaim artistic control”.

“My portrait subverts the phenomenon of face-swapping technology, questioning authenticity and AI’s role in artmaking,” McCart said.

Interwoven Existence by James Randall consists of slices one pixel wide taken from 1000 different photograph of the artist.

Another highly unusual portrait won the Metro Arts Experimental Portraiture Prize of $1000.

James Randall’s Interwoven Existence resembles nothing so much as a series of vertical and horizontal pencil lines. Each line is, in fact, a single slice of one original photo one pixel wide, extracted digitally and layered into a new image.

One thousand images from Randall’s life are sampled in the portrait, which the artist said was meant to “represent the fluidity of the fabric of my existence”.

While some of the winning works defy expectation, the winner of the top award, the Lord Mayor’s Prize of $50,000, is an old-fashioned oil-and-canvas painting that resembles the sitter. The Artist’s Studio by Brisbane painter Imogen Corbett portrays her art teacher and muse Natalya Hughes.

The Artist’s Studio by Imogen Corbett, a portrait of artist and educator Natalya Hughes, won the top prize.

Lead judge Bree Pickering, director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, said Corbett’s portrait was joyful, approachable and well-executed.

“Beautifully composed, it also celebrates prettiness in the colour, patterns and texture of the fabrics, but the subject is central and has a commanding expression,” Pickering said.

The Brisbane Portrait Prize is open to artists and sitters with a connection to Brisbane.

People featuring in this year’s finalist works include rugby league legend Wally Lewis, Girl and Girl lead singer Kai James, outgoing Queensland Ballet director Leanne Benjamin, media personality Jamie Dunn and Gardening Australia presenter Hannah Moloney.

Brisbane Portrait Prize Finalists Exhibition is on at the State Library of Queensland from August 3 to November 10. Entry is free.