A Short Ride Through Hyperspace is an immersive AV installation journeying endlessly through the generative landscape of a customised AI model.
The work is part of the project Diffeomorphism, which aims to explore AI in its own terms, rather than by how well it emulates human creativity.
The images are created using the the StyleGAN family of AI models. I've modified its code to animate it, and to expand the borders of its generated images. This reveals an abstract world of waveforms and fractals that themselves reveal something of how the AI model sees the world.
I trained the AI model exclusively on my own lifetime archive of 25k or so photos (excluding identifiable images of others). Every image it creates is based on something I've seen at some point in my life.
I composed the soundtrack in the regular way. I drew extensively on recordings from my life: field recordings, choral works that are significant to me, and a short sample from a MIDI synth composition I wrote when I was 7 or 8 (thank you Dad for thinking to record that onto a tape).
So both image and sound emerge from two different types of mind seeking out sense and meaning from an archive of decontextualised recordings.
The whole expanse of possible images this AI can generate is controlled by its latent space, a 512-dimensional hyperspace. Each image is determined by these 512 numbers, which define a position in that space. See Diffeomorphism for more about the topological ideas within the work.
61 minute looping film rendered at 3x4k, presented in an immersive cave format, stereo audio.
Exhibitions
- 26-29 Oct 2023, Frequency Festival, Lincoln, UK
Press
- STIRworld, Frequency Festival in Lincoln is a triumph of community and virtual placemaking, 24 Nov 2023.
- Ming Pao, 英國林肯巿展覽：數碼藝術文化節 歷史與科技連線 [Lincoln City Exhibition, UK: Digital Art and Culture Festival Connects History and Technology] (online and print), 6 Dec 2023.
Related works
Related texts
Adventures in AI Self-Custody
I learnt to build AI models because I wanted to fall in love with AI, to see it as a collaborator in human agency, to be excited rather than afraid.
AI’s weird and uncanny mistakes reveal the gaps in how I perceive intelligence
I’m used to seeing human-like intellectual capabilities together as a bundle, what I consider human intelligence. If a human can draw photorealistic faces, I might assume they have mastered many other intellectual abilities, like a deep sensitivity to human physiology and how it exists in physical reality.
Acknowledgements
A Short Ride Through Hyperspace was originally presented at Frequency International Festival of Digital Culture, Lincoln 2023. Produced by Threshold Studios.
Thank you to Adriana Minu for feedback during development. Thank you to Sam Lindsey, Simon Hollingworth, Andy Lindley and Georgina Weller for support exhibiting at Frequency Festival.
Created using a customised version of StyleGAN3, which was created by Nvidia.
Part of the project Diffeomorphism.