Since the advent of artificial intelligence and its astonishing image-generating capacities, artists the world over have been both disturbed and fascinated by it. Some fear that these new tools could render human creativity obsolete, while others see in them a chance to reexamine what art and imagination itself can be. For “Art Restart,” this conversation marks the beginning of a deeper exploration of how AI might radically reshape the act of making art and the role of the artist in society.

Painter Damian Stamer is an ideal guide for this inquiry. Known for transforming photographs of abandoned barns and rural landscapes near his North Carolina home into luminous, memory-laden canvases — both UNCSA and the Kenan Institute for the Arts have Damian Stamer originals in their collections — Damian has now begun experimenting with AI-generated images as source material for his paintings. Rather than replacing his hand or vision, the technology has become a provocative collaborator, one that helps him probe what remains uniquely human in the creative process.

In this interview, Damian reflects on how working with AI has deepened his understanding of intuition, authorship and faith in an age increasingly defined by machines.

https://damianstamer.com/home.html

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