Bombay Sapphire - AI Art Collection

As part of Bombay Sapphire’s “Stir Creativity” campaign, Yinka Ilori Studio collaborated with production company Happy Finish to create a collection of AI-driven artwork for Frieze Art Fair. The project was inspired by recent research carried out by Bombay Sapphire on technology and creativity. The research showed that almost 50% of the UK population said that technology encourages them to be more creative.

Happy Finish used a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) system to train the AI program with a series of input images to create new data set instances that resemble/mimic the training data. The machine was fed with both Yinka Ilori artwork and Bombay Sapphire brand imagery to create a new collection of art.

“The beauty of AI is that it generated new content based on its memory of my illustrations that had been fed into an algorithm, there is something quite fascinating about this process and the theme of memory, as a huge part of my practice involves investigating how colour can be used as a form of memory to tell new stories. This way of processing and projecting memory makes me extremely excited about the future and how it will shape the way I decide to tell my stories and remember my memories.”
- Yinka Ilori

“A range of images were inputted to create a dataset to train the AI, in order for it to generate a unique depiction of collaboration between Bombay Sapphire and Yinka, based on memory. The system reveals an emerging behaviour of art creation and memory, showing completely new images inspired by the artist but also trying to replicate images previously seen on the dataset. We found this process to be perfectly aligned with Yinka's art and inspiration.” - Marco Marchesi, CTO at Happy Finish.