Jonathan Zawada offers Mark Pritchard's cowl artwork a twisted AI contact
MP Productions EP 1 Cover Art by Jonathan Zawada
Australian artist and designer Jonathan Zawada used AI-powered generative imagery to create the cover artwork for Mark Pritchard's new project MP Productions EP 1. The cover art posted on Warp is distorted and deformed to create a surreal effect.
The concept arose out of an effort to transcend every single style or approach, explains Zawada and instead conveys several identities – suitable for a producer who has previously published works under countless aliases and has tapped an amalgam of genres for this EP alone.
The EP cover was created with a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network, a kind of framework for machine learning) using image inputs that include a feather boa, toilet paper, a mask, bubbles, a comic book, a vase, a television, perfume, a phone , a football helmet, a lipstick and a delivery truck.
The resulting artwork is a bizarre collage of mismatched shapes and textures that combine to form the head and torso, albeit with the appearance of having melted. In the context of tracks like One Way Mirror, which appears as a cynical comment on Big Tech, the artwork takes an ironic look at the technologies that created it. The track ends with a series of bogus advertisements created by Pritchard, including robot voice-over and lines like “We believe algorithms don't feel and humans do,” which inspired Zawada's approach to cover design: “Me wanted to match the clinical, weird and slightly eerie and almost hysterical tone of the advertisement that Mark did for this track. "
Be like water
In my heart
Zawada adopted a variety of techniques when it came to the artwork for the EP's two singles, from 3D rendering to hand-drawn illustrations to manipulating classic artwork. While the cover uses a GAN, the artwork for the track Be Like Water is a still image from a 3D simulation of liquid recreated with thousands of modeled crayons.
Meanwhile, the artwork for In My Heart leans into the art space. "I got lost in several archives of high-resolution scans of paintings in various museum collections that were published under Creative Commons," says Zawada. The goal then became “to aggregate the feeling and the feelings behind different but harmonious works of art” and to transform them into a kind of “super painting”. He made many iterations of it and worked with Pritchard to decide which would best match the "unusual tone of the song that seems both ethereal and structured."
The two have been long-time employees, with Zawada having created everything over the years, from earlier cover designs to VR experiences to a number of 3D head scans for the music producer. Zawada's work on the new EP complements a growing archive of images that don't more clearly paint a picture of Pritchard as a music artist – and it seems that is exactly what he wanted.
Mark Pritchard's MP Productions EP 1 is available now from Warp. warp.net; zawada.art