Leo Krukowski Art

"... Whereas in former times, when the kings my forefathers fashioned a bronze image in the likeness of their members, to put on display inside their temples, the labour on them exhausted every craftsman; in their ignorance and lack of knowledge they needed so much oil, wax and tallow for the work that they caused a shortage in their own countries - I, Sennacherib, leader of all princes, knowledgeable in all kinds of work, took much advice and deep thought over doing that work.

Great pillars of bronze, colossal striding lions, such as no previous king had ever constructed before me, with the technical skill that Ninushki brought to perfection in me, and at the prompting of my intelligence and the desire of my heart I invented a technique for bronze and made it skillfully. I created clay moulds as if by divine intelligence. I fashioned a work of bronze and cunningly wrought it. Over great gišmahhu and alamittu, twelve fierce lion-colossi together with twelve mighty bull-colossi which were perfect castings. I poured copper into them over and over again..."

Sometime after the above text was written on a clay tablet, Sennacherib's Assyria was conquered. All of the metal in his kingdom had been used to make bronze lions and bulls, and his soldiers were left with arrowheads made of bone.

'12 Fierce Lion Colossi Striding' is a series of 12 digital bronzes of 'Everydays: the First 5000 Days' by Beeple. Here, they are presented as frames in a video. Each image was made with an AI that interpreted Beeple's collage after being trained on an image of my bronze sculpture 'Counterfeit' from my series 'Lionize.'

Each jpg is 35776 x 35776 pixels, or 1.28 gigapixels. At 300dpi they are about 10 feet square. This process, known as Neural Style Transfer or NST was introduced to me by Xavier Snelgrove in our project ‘Subjective Functions x Lionize.’ It was made by Alexander Mordvintsev, a Google engineer in 2014.