Upping the Ante –

‘Time and time wait for no man’ Even within a short space of time the developments in ‘Ai’ assisted creative tools has been astounding!  As soon as I realised that text to image was available I remembered my comments that it was only a matter of time before we had text to video.  Indeed I wasn’t wrong.  Apparently Google is already in a race with a number of other companies to achieve text to video.  I have already seen for myself some of the early examples of this which are pretty impressive even at the beta stage.  If you would like a pink and blue hippo skateboarding down the street with a banana on its head then you probably won’t have that long to wait.  I generated the following text to video imagery.  Looking at the videos, I particularly like the morphing effect generated by the software.  However, what fascinated me more were the stills that I managed to pull from the Luminogram text to video ‘Ai’ driven generator.  Hidden people and buildings seemed to pop in and out of nowhere.  I like this idea of ‘hidden’ mysterious images.  I have been researching around hidden things in both nature and art, so to find something hidden in an Ai generated piece seemed somewhat prescient.  It could certainly become a new line of enquiry.  Below are two of the videos I generated along with with a gallery of stills.  The more I think about it, the more I would like to explore this hidden imagery further – its feels to me almost like a ‘ghost in the machine’.

Nature – Stills to Video

The seed images for the video below were all shot by me.

Luminograms – Stills to Video

The seed images I used for this particular stills to video compilation were a selection from the Luminograms I shot for an earlier post.  It is from this video that the stills are generated.  My seed images were created by pure light in a process I have experimented with in the past.  However, I really do think that there is something quite mysterious and almost compelling about the stills that the ‘Ai’ generated from them in making the video.  I deliberately styled this video to reveal only certain parts of it at certain times.  I wanted to add an extra layer of mystery to it.

Hidden Stills Gallery

Evaluation and Conclusion

I think that the discovery of the hidden images in the ‘Ai’ video was quite a moment.  Up to this point I had a relatively clear idea of where my project was taking me.  However, I have been mesmerised by this form of text to moving image generation.  It is less about the resulting video but the stills generated from it.  At the moment none of the stills above have been edited.  I feel that there is an opportunity to enhance these images and work more closely with the colours.  As I am exploring a human hybrid form of art I also think that there is an opportunity to paint some of these or draw them.  It might also be interesting to explore some form of collage.  In my piece ‘Memento Mori’.  I was looking at the idea of time and a working digital clock.  It may be that these pieces would fit in well with a clock.  A logistical challenge   For this idea would be having enough pieces to fill a 24 hour period.  These pieces would then have to loop.  I suspect that this isn’t an insurmountable problem but it is one that needs to be addressed.

I strongly suspected that as I began this journey, my digital camera would call me back. Because I am quite happy with the abstract imagery from the stills I feel I would like to create more Luminogram images.  They are painstaking slow and difficult to make but coupled with the ‘Ai’ experiment I feel something unique could be created.  I will continue to explore…