sovid – Looking Outwards #1

I recently attended a lecture at SIGGRAPH 2019 called "Classic Art, Cutting Edge", in which I was exposed to an animated short created for Google Spotlight. The 3D animated short told the story of an old sailor who finds redemption when he saves a young girl who had fallen overboard her ship. I enjoyed the story, but what captivated me the most was the way the animation was presented. The team of ten or so people at Boathouse studios had managed to create a beautiful sketch-like ocean scene that was able to run in realtime and in VR. I believe the project took them almost a year since the team was so small and the film was about 12 minutes. I am very interested in the new ways film and storytelling can be shown outside the scope of traditional theaters, and I have been working with more VR related projects recently. The shaders and ocean scripts were created by the team, as animating and simulating the ocean using normal simulation in Maya, for instance, would be too expensive for VR (the whole film is set in the ocean). I admire how they were able to create a captivating film, where the viewer has the ability to look wherever they would like but still be able to follow the narrative the way they intended.

A theatrical (non VR) version can be found here.

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Limbo by Playdead, 2010
Gif source

As a lover of all things whimsical and uncanny, I'd describe discovering Limbo as my first experience being truly in awe of computational art. Developed by the small, Danish studio known as Playdead, it is just as much a work of art as it is a puzzle-based video game. Starting in a dark forest without evident controls or instructions, the game chronicles the terrifying challenges of a young boy as he travels through "the edge of hell." Unlike my favorite movies and books that could fall into the same genre, I'm in love with how Limbo uses code to tell a story and invites you to experience art through interaction. It feels far more intimate than animation; as you are tasked with saving this unfortunate protagonist, the creator invites you to explore and uncover what they've made for you. 

Starting as an independent project by Arnt Jensen in 2004, the game took 6 years to complete and expanded to a team of 16 by the time of its release. According to Wikipedia, much of Limbo's artistic direction drew from Jensen's personal experiences as a child and his admiration for the film noir genre. Martin Stig Andersen, an expert in "acousmatic music," compliments the exceptional art direction with an unearthly soundtrack comprised of computer-generated sounds. The game was created using Visual Basic and Visual Studio. Following Limbo's major success, Playdead expanded as a company and developed its second eerie horror game, Inside, in 2017 (as I patiently waited 3 years for its release).

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In one of the more chilling puzzles in the game, the boy must cross a pond without being killed by one of the many giant spiders.

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Sword Experience is an art installation piece by Red Paper Heart studio, inspired by the HBO series, Game of Thrones. They were asked to convey Arya Stark's journey in becoming an assassin. To create the piece they created custom graphics engine, written in the C++ framework Cinder, blends both 2d and 3d visual elements which are then masked by the user's own photo. The final artwork is then uploaded to a server and available for sharing the moment a user steps off stage.

This interactive game really inspires me because it not only maintain a high artistic craftsmanship but also creates a world that remains true to the original story. As commercial interactive ins is becoming more and more popular, the criteria in the field should be more about what quality can we achieve from and what meaning can we assign to the interactive technology. This piece successfully tells a very poetic story through very simple interaction.

Link: https://redpaperheart.com/work/swordexperience

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One major project that inspired me to take this class was the teamLab lecture and presentation last year. Their BORDERLESS installation in the MORI building in Tokyo was incredible (though I have not had the chance to visit in person, I am referencing the images presented during the lecture and on their website). TeamLab specializes in large-scale installations, incorporating both art and computer science into an interactive experience that is different for each viewer, as it relies heavily on user movement and actions. As a student interested in both art and computer science, and pursuing a degree in BCSA, this project seemed like a perfect harmony of the two disciplines, combining them in a way I never thought of before. I do not know the exact number of people involved in making it, but it must be a few hundred people involved in the entire process. To my knowledge, all of the computer graphics, artwork, and sound are created by teamLab, using custom scripts to program the entire installation. The project's creators might have been inspired by Japanese folk stories and cultural tales, as well as cultural objects of Japan. The project points to more connections and collaboration between computer scientists and artists, and the coming up of a more technological and interactive world.

https://borderless.teamlab.art/ , BORDERLESS, teamLab.

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Monument Valley is an indie puzzle game developed and published by Ustwo Games, where the user manipulates the world of mazes of optical illusions and impossible objects in order to allow the Princess to reach a final platform.

I love this game because not only do the aesthetics and art style of the game really appeal to me (the color scheme is amazing and the UX of the entire game is incredibly satisfying and soothing), the puzzle part of this game is solved by utilizing the concept of impossible squares. I really admire this game because it almost breaks the laws of physics, and the user is required to "think outside of the box" to figure out the solutions for each puzzle. It takes advantage of the isometric art style and forces users to think about how the different structures can be moved around in order to find the solution. In addition, each level seems very different from the last (in that each setting and structure represents something else, from castles to moats, to random climbing structures), but still utilizes the same rules it establishes from the get go. I admire the simplicity of this game play, yet the game creation itself is quite complex.

 

The game was developed over ten months in 2013; the visual style was inspired by Japanese prints, minimalist sculpture, and other indie games.  The creators drew a lot of inspiration from other artists and art history.  The art was designed such that each frame would be worthy of public display. Ustwo is a digital design firm company that has designed iPhone apps since 2017.

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"Changing the meaning and make it our own."

I find it really inspiring to see where these creators drew their own inspiration from. These other artworks gave ideas of more than just level design, but what the setting of a stage would look like, the color scheme of the structures, even the structure/castles themselves.

Although that the game appears 2D, it was built with 3D assets; custom-built extensions to the Unity Editor enabled Ustwo to create architecture that looks connected through the game-view camera, though in reality it isn't actually next to each other in world space.

One thing I found lacking within Monument Valley was it's story line, as it does have one and each stage opens with a quote that serves drama to the table, but I felt as though it made no difference to how I played the game. In fact, at times, it made no sense. I think adding a little story element behind why each structure was the way it is (why water here? why add the impossible square columns here?) can increase the gameplay experience.

The creators really did in effective job in creating a game where each still / snapshot of the gameplay is picturesque, making for a great screenshot. The way it thinks outside the box of physics really amazes me, and I admire it very much.

Game Trailer

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Mark Wheeler's This City is the piece that inspired me to learn openFrameworks. In the piece, Wheeler sits surrounded by a garden of synthesizers, MIDI controllers, and a laptop. Behind him, one sees a projection of infinite spanning roads packed with cars, which he controls with the MIDI devices around him. Part of the mysticism of the piece comes from the video composition: the dark room with subtle blips of light from the machines and the electronic music create a murky, ethereal tone. A moment that I especially admire is around the 1:18 minute mark where Wheeler cuts from footage of him turning a knob to the gravity disappearing in the scene.

This editing technique was able to convey a causal relationship in an elegant way. Mark coded the app himself using openFrameworks and co-directed the video with Clay Weishaar, and was assisted by Christine Cha. Around the time of the work, live coding audio visual had an exciting subculture forming, with tools such as Quil and Overtone becoming widely available. This project pointed towards an exciting future of coevolutionary works where audio and video have a direct relationship, instead of one controlling the other.

Link to project

 

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The new and improved Artbreeder UI.

For this blog post, I wanted to go into detail about GANbreeder (soon to be renamed Artbreeder,) my favorite software art tool/project and one which I have used extensively. GANbreeder is a web application developed by Joel Simon, a BCSA alum, that allows users to interact with the latent space of BigGAN.

BigGAN is a generative adversarial neural network (GAN) that benefits from even more parameters and larger datasets than a traditional GAN. Therefore, its creations achieve a higher Inception score, a measure of the diversity and photorealistic quality of a generative network's creations. On GANbreeder, users can mix "genes" (ImageNet categories, say 'Siamese cat' and 'coffeepot',) and BigGAN will create novel images within the latent space between those categories. By "editing genes" (adjusting sliders,) the user can modulate the network's relative confidence levels of one category or another. The user can "crossbreed" two prior GANbreeder creations to mix their categories into one image, or spawn "children," which are randomized variations on the confidence levels that tweak the image slightly.

What I find most inspiring about GANbreeder as a project is the magical, surreal quality of the images that come out of it. These dreamlike images provoke responses ranging from awe to fear, and question the straightforward sense of how meaning is created in the mind. Perceptual information in the visual system provokes memories and emotions in other parts of the brain. But where in this process does a slightly misshapen dog make us feel so deeply uncomfortable?

As a tool, GANbreeder is inspiring because it democratizes a cutting-edge technology -- the user doesn't have to write a single line of code, much less possess a graduate ML degree. I've been interested in AI art since high school, but coding doesn't come naturally to me, so I have this project to thank for keeping my interest alive and helping me get a sense of what work I want to make.

From a conceptual standpoint, GANbreeder raises complicated questions about authorship. I chose the categories that make up 'my' creations and messed with sliders, but who 'made' the resulting image? Was it me, Joel Simon, the researchers who developed BigGAN, or the network itself? What about Ian Goodfellow, who is said to have 'invented' GANs in 2014, or all the researchers going back to the early days of AI? You can read here about a dispute between Danielle Baskin, an artist and active GANbreeder user, and Alexander Reben, who painted (through a commissioned painting service) a near-exact copy of one of Baskin's generated 'works.' At this time, GANbreeder was anonymous, but Simon has since implemented user profiles. It's not clear whether this will solve the question of authorship or merely complicate it further. As shown in the case of Edmond Belamy, any given person or group's ownership of AI artwork is tenuous at best.

Simon is currently at work on a GANbreeder overhaul. Not only will the project be renamed Artbreeder, it will expand to include more categories, an improved ML approach (BigGAN-deep,) and specific models for better generation of album covers, anime faces, landscapes, and portraits. I'm in the Artbreeder beta, and I still think the standard BigGAN model ('General') produces the most exciting images. Maybe it's because lack of commonality between the categories leads to weirder and more unexpected imagery. But overall, as a sort of participatory, conceptual AI art project, I think GANbreeder is one of my favorite things created in the last two years.

Here's a collection of my GANbreeder creations that I'm most satisfied with (I like to make weird little animals.)

 

There isn't a singular artist who I would say is making the 'best' GANbreeder work, but you can find great stuff on the Reddit page or the featured page on the site.

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I often look for inspiration in the 1996 video game "The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall." It was developed by only 27 people (excluding beta testers), which is a small amount when compared to modern teams. Daggerfall ran on XnGine, one of the first true 3D game engines. In terms of gameplay, there is a lot of influence from the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons and earlier first-person PC RPGs like Ultima: Underworld. Aesthetically speaking, the art direction draws clear inspiration from medieval fantasy art. The lead artist, Mark Jones, worked on many DnD themed games. As to what we can learn about the game's immersion, I'll provide examples of what players can do: buy and sell buildings, loan money from banks, barter with merchants, own boats and explore a region the size of the United Kingdom. If all this was possible in 1996, why can't we do it now? I admire this project because of the ambitious world and the hand-drawn art it has.

It's worth mentioning that a small community of modders ported the game over Unity 3D and Daggerfall has never looked better!

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Generating Human Faces From Sliders

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This is a machine learning application that has been given a database of high school yearbooks and learned to generate yearbook photos based on what it has decided are the most important components of these photos. Some of these components can be easily identified and labeled, meaning that theoretically, with some fine-tuning, unique faces could be generated given gender, hair color, height, complexion, etc. The application was developed CodeParade, who is a self-described software hobbyist. This program is showcased on their Youtube channel, and is available for anyone to download.

This project was especially impressive to me because despite the fact that it's just a single developer exploring an idea that they're interested in, the product actually works surprisingly well, and it's pretty fun to play with. It seems like CodeParade is genuinely curious about the projects that they do, and they put serious effort into it. I think this project is a really novel and somewhat intuitive way to showcase and experiment with this aspect of machine learning (auto encoders). They've actually put the project online since I last looked at it: http://codeparade.net/faces/. I really appreciate that they made the code open source and available. It would also be interesting to see what most people think of as the most important components of a human face, and compare those with what the computer thinks. CodeParade has also applied this program to other datasets, such as Garfield comics and names of classes. Check out their website (http://codeparade.net) and the video introducing this project:

Computer Generates Human Faces

 

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https://www.choiceofgames.com/creatures-such-as-we/#utm_medium=web&utm_source=ourgames

For this Looking Outwards, I'd like to share a charming text-based adventure game site I found around 2009 and my favorite game from their collection. Choice of Games is a company that produces and hosts text-based adventure games created using their scripting language ChoiceScript. I like these works because they are lengthy, well-written, fantasy-esque games with meaningful choices, but there are a couple interesting characteristics about this platform that are relevant to this class.

First is how Choice of Game hosts curated user-created games written with ChoiceScript. I find this relevant to how media art seeks to be completely democratized and accessible, but I am reminded of a post I saw a long time ago complaining about ChoiceScript ruining the sanctity of text-based adventures. This makes me wonder why creative technology seems particularly prone to gatekeeping. Perhaps this is more because art in general is prone to gatekeeping, but its exclusiveness is highlighted when juxtaposed with technology's affinity for mass adoption.

Second, I cannot help drawing comparisons to Twine and wondering why Twine has become the creative's tool of choice rather than ChoiceScript. The most straightforward conclusion is that ChoiceScript is created specifically for text-based adventure games, whereas Twine broadly supports choice-based games in general. HTML, CSS, and visual languages are all tools supported by Twine. With ChoiceScript, narrative trees and eloquence are the only tools available. To me, I don't see this as a downside because these tighter constraints make for rich storytelling, but it definitely falls short on interactivity and functions more as a novel.

What I desire more from Choice of Games are narratives that are not standard fantasy-adventure stories but more introspective or exploratory. This is why I link Creatures Such as We as an example instead of one of their more popular games like Choice of the Cat. (Yes, it's exactly what you'd expect). Creatures Such as We is "a philosophical interactive romance novel by Lynnea Glasser" about video games on the moon. I don't have any justification for liking this story besides I'm a sap.