I remember seeing Sofia Crespo’s Neural Zoo during the first week of class when I was perusing the AI Art Gallery website and being completely awestruck by the pieces she produced. There was something so beautiful about these organisms that a neural network created:
Inspired by Neural Zoo, I want to focus my midterm on creating a collection of generative art. I love the concept of a neural network being able to create realistic yet whimsical objects we have never seen before, and want to apply this to my project.
I did a little bit of research on AI generative art and found that many works use GANs (general adversarial networks), where one neural network tries to create increasingly “realistic” outputs while another neural network attempts to reject each of these outputs, the play between the two resulting in more and more convincing outputs (Source: Mike Tyka’s “Portraits of Imaginary People”).
Thus, I would like to try and train a GAN to create generative art, with a focus on cityscapes. If I feed a GAN pictures of cities from all around the world, what kind of new city would it produce? Would they look dystopian? Utopian? What kind of cultural elements would be present in each generated city? Many works of fiction try and depict what future cities look like, but these fictional worlds are all determined by humans. Blade Runner, for example, is really interesting to me because everything is extremely urban, dark, neon and partially inspired by Asian cityscapes.
If a neural network created this fictional world, however, what would it look like? This is the question I am curious to explore through my midterm project.