Alie Jackson has pretty much done everything. An extremely talented (and awarded) multimedia artist, she’s worked with everyone from Nike to Disney to Sony Pictures.
The Most Artistic Lens Creator of Lens Fest 2019, her work, a blend of AR and traditional media, is downright cool. Insightful, funny, bright, engaging, beautiful — I don’t have enough adjectives to describe Jackson’s style and work. You’ll just have to see for yourself.
Q: How long have you been using Snapchat? When did you start making your own lenses?
A: I started making my own Snap lenses in Spring of 2018 for an art installation that merged physical artwork with AR.
Q: Which lens (of ones you’ve made or others) is your current favorite?
A: My favorite lens at the moment is a piece I made for a recent art show I had in Austin [Texas]. The lens, Super Spreaders, is an abstract take on the people out in the world not taking Covid-19 guidelines seriously.
Q: What do you like about creating lenses and seeing people use them?
A: I think that AR and lenses in general are the new frontier for artistic expression. There are so many interesting ways to use this tool as an artist and for the work to become a playful experience that the viewer can actively engage with, unlike anything that has been possible in the art world before.
Q: In what ways do your lenses currently use machine learning?
A: My lens UncomfortablyClose uses Style Transfer ML. This lens was for the same exhibition where I showed textile pieces and also created lenses. I trained the image transfer using a macro crop of a textile piece, giving the entire lens the same color/texture as the textiles. It was a really interesting way to merge the two mediums. I am by no means a ML pro, so I was able to use the Lens Studio Style Transfer resources to create the lens.
Q: As a Lens Studio Creator, what opportunities do you think a tool like SnapML provides?
A: I think Snap ML provides another great avenue for creativity and an additional layer of conceptual thinking to my work.
Q: Where do you see your career going — how important is it for you to be a digital creator?
A: My ultimate career goal is to work exclusively on my own artwork and also collaborate with brands and marry my style with their brand and end-goals. As a multimedia artist, I straddle the line between physical and digital works, so working in the digital realm [and] learning new tools is just as important as experimenting with new physical materials and tools.
Check out more of Jackson’s work here.
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