Neural GIF Loops

Some neural style transfer applied to animated GIF loops (the kind of loops pioneered by George Redhawk).

The Sacred and the Profane (Neural Art)

I’ve been further experimenting with neural style transfer techniques – and have always wanted do something with Buddhist art. I’ve always been uninspired and disappointed by modern Buddhist art, I guess though these are mere worldly expressions that don’t really aid one’s quest on the path. However, I feel obliged to try my hand. The ‘art’ in neural style transfer is finding the right source imagery to best suit / express want you want. In these examples – I used a flame fractal – full of repeating geometry, sweeping curves, and lots of recursion. When applied to some Buddhist statues and iconography – it gives it a certain sophisticated, scientific, mathematical feel – yet hand made with love and care. Buddhism is a science of the heart and mind.

Now, having been pleased with these results – I turned my mind to something quite random. I like subverting things, particularly imagery. I thought what would pornographic imagery look like through these filtered changes. So I applied the style transfer using the same flame fractal – and the result is kind of horrifying and creepy. And then I realised that this is very much connected to the Buddhist path – where it is a common meditation practice to contemplate the foulness and disgust of the human body in order to release one from desire and lust – more of a practice among dedicated monks than of lay people, understandably.
Anyway – it got me thinking about the neural theme throughout – the process is about understanding human perception, and changing it – very apt…

Neural Art

Ever restless and never wanting to keep doing the same kind of thing, I’m currently delving into ‘neural art’. I thrive on the new, and learning new things, doing new things, with new tools and new techniques – that, historically has been always been my inspiration.

By neural art, I mean machine learning, artificial intelligence and in my first quick experiments – exploring neural style transfer. Neural style transfer is an AI process of looking at one picture, and transferring its visual aesthetic style onto another picture.

There’s lots of open source code for this available on the web. I spent time finding the best code, installing it and setting up my laptop with GPU / CUDA enhanced acceleration (absolutely essential for this kind computationally intense work).

Here’s my first results, it takes time, like anything, tweaking parameters, seeing what works, why it works.. learn, process, see, repeat..

For the source images with which to ‘extract’ a visual style, I chose local Belfast artist John Luke (1906 – 1975) – and transferred his style onto photos of some iconic landmarks in the city – the whimsical notion of how a dead artist would new perceive and paint his modern day birth city if he were alive.

Make Art with Data

more from me on this project soon…

I can't tell you much about this yet, but here's a sneak peek of a free tool that lets you do abstract images based on data (no code needed.) We'll launch it in the next few months. I'm very excited about its possibilities pic.twitter.com/7cBGljhxF6

— Alberto Cairo (@albertocairo) June 11, 2018

My Radiohead video selected for Ars Electronica 2017

Codex, my fan made Radiohead video, has been selected for this year’s Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria.  The theme this year is Artificial Intelligence.

In 2009 I won a Prix Ars Award of Distinction for my Peter Gabriel video, The Nest that Sailed the Sky.

Nice to have my work featured there once again, brings back fond memories of walking around Linz, absorbing both classic and modern culture, of which I’ve somehow managed to contribute a tiny bit.