We are all connected #04 - Underworld.mp4, 2020
Early generative AI video. Originally made as audio-reactive visual compositions to popular pop songs, now dubbed with same tempo & feel music made by me.
One thing I was really keen to do, is to avoid random latent walks. Instead I was interested in 'meaningful' controlled explorations. To find & plot visually interesting, intentional trajectories (decoding to form, composition & movement).
I'd also been building my own models. The legal & ethical status of using other ppls imgs w/o their consent always concerned me, so I'd only use public domain, CC0, or own images (thx to flickr API 👍). These are from a model I built and trained around 2017 (progan), which I used for "Deep Meditations", 2018, and this offshoot series "We are all connected" 2018-2020
Deep Meditations is a series of works that exist in various forms, primarily a large-scale video and sound installation; a multi-channel, long-form abstract film; a monument that celebrates life, nature, the universe and our subjective experience of it. The work invites us on a spiritual journey through slow, meditative, continuously evolving images and sounds, told through the imagination of a deep artificial neural network.
We are invited to acknowledge and appreciate the role we play as humans as part of a complex ecosystem heavily dependent on the balanced co-existence of many components. The work embraces and celebrates the interconnectedness of all human, non-human, living and non living things across many scales of time and space – from microbes to galaxies.
Memo Akten, www.memo.tv, 2018-2020