Chicken or Beef (2018)
In the whimsically titled Chicken or Beef, Klingemann ventures into the realm of figuration and flesh, using AI to deconstruct the human body into abstract, meat-like forms. This 2018 series evolved as a side project of his “Imposture” experiments, where he trained GANs on images of nude bodies to explore how machines perceive the human figure.
Klingemann’s process began with a pix2pix model that learned to render a human form from a stick-figure pose, using a dataset of tens of thousands of full-body photographs curated specifically to capture unclothed, full-length poses. Instead of feeding the network conventional poses, he generated random, often impossible configurations, such as contorted mannequins with extra limbs or absurd postures beyond human capability. The AI dutifully attempted to render a human form from these nonsensical skeletons.
The outcome was a series of grotesque yet compelling images: fleshy, pinkish-beige masses that vaguely suggest torsos, limbs, or faces but never resolve into a discernible figure. These biomorphic forms are simultaneously anatomical and abstract, an arm melting into a torso, skin-like textures merging with void, placing the viewer in a perceptual limbo: are they seeing a contorted human, an animal carcass, or simply digital noise? The title Chicken or Beef wryly reinforces this ambiguity, evoking the trivial choice of an in-flight meal while humorously equating human forms to meat options.
Klingemann intentionally dialed up the strangeness to elicit outputs that are more abstract and less recognizable than his earlier Imposture series. Commentators have noted that his flesh-like distortions recall the Surrealist disarticulations of Hans Bellmer’s doll figures and the painterly grotesques of Francis Bacon. Each image emerges as the AI’s hallucination of a human in the absence of a coherent blueprint, a feedback loop of the algorithm’s imagination producing bizarre, creaturely shapes. There is also a dialogue with the contemporaneous work of Robbie Barrat, a fellow pioneer of AI art who around 2018 was using GANs to generate nude figure studies. In fact, Barrat’s series of AI-generated nude portrait NFTs, given away at Christie’s 2018 Art+Tech Summit on 17th July 2018 and later dubbed the “Lost Robbies”, became iconic early examples of AI art’s cultural and market value. Klingemann’s Chicken or Beef, unveiled on the exact same day, stands as a companion statement.
