Listen up, creatives. I'm Krug, the post-photographer from the rain-soaked streets of Vancouver. I've partnered with the visionaries at SFU's Metacreation Lab, who have developed an incredible open-source AI tool called Autolume.
We're using this neural network-based visual synthesizer to fuse my analog photography archive with their cutting-edge generative AI.
We live in an era of constant digital documentation, filtering, and sharing into the social media maelstrom. Our identities are fluid, our realities bendable by digital augmentation. In this simulated realm, what even defines an "Artist" anymore? That's the brain-twisting question that made me take a sledgehammer to conventional assumptions about creativity.
My roots are very analog - hauling around old film cameras, chemically imprinting portraits onto strips of plastic. I've amassed over 150,000 of those light-trapped moments, now archived on Flickr as an untapped well of source imagery ripe for computational evolution by Autolume.
Autolume is a powerful tool that allows artists to train generative AI models from scratch or build upon existing ones. This Friday, we're kicking off training using my trove of 650 processed analog film portraits from my archive. The Metacreation Lab's immense GPU power and supercomputing resources will drive this training process.
Autolume handles all the usual preprocessing workflows seamlessly - loading images, facial detection, cropping, and cleaning up the data for smooth model training. But this is just the prelude to the real metamorphic magic.
The main event will be pumping those GAN-based generative systems (Generative Adversarial Networks) full of my analog aesthetic DNA. Infecting the clinical AI circuitry with the noisy, skewed fingerprints of my personal style. Like overclocking a GPU by force-feeding it mind-bending interdimensional signals.
And you know what happens when you intentionally pollute an AI's training grounds? It starts birthing entirely new, unnatural forms of semi-sentient imagery. Fleshy, twitching collages that ooze between conventional boundaries - photography, sculpture, video, and other antiquated categories melting into a transdisciplinary hybrid state.