/Stained (2021)
Made in collaboration with IT specialist Albert de Roos, Stained is a photographic-AI portrait of a former paint factory on the Donker Curtiusstraat in Amsterdam West (Nr. 23). Designed by Dutch-Catholic architect Lau Peters (1900-1969) and completed in 1941, the former paint factory, now home to IT company Data Science Lab, is characterized by a striking combination of richly-colored, figurative stained-glass windows and rationalist, angular brick walls.
With her cellphone camera, Evenblij explored the lines, shapes, and colors of the building’s windows and stairwells, walls and doors. These snapshots were then inserted into de Roos’s “generative adversarial network”, an artificial intelligence program which teaches itself to create new images resembling the input images.
The results were painterly impressions of the details which first caught Evenblij’s eye: a figure’s stained-glass hand is reimagined, the sunlight blended with the glass to form a deeper and more fluid texture. Black iron window frames are whisked together with the colorful glass panes they carry, forming a visual ode to the architectural interdependence of such disparate materials and shapes.
While both Borrowed Spaces and Stained have architectural landmarks as their starting points, the latter project differs from the former in that for Stained, Donker Curtiusstraat 23 is also its end point. Evenblij and de Roos’s process of rediscovering its beauty through photography and AI, serves to paint an intimate portrait of a building, its space, and the depth of its surfaces.
