Show HN: I built an AI art installation at home generating new pieces on the fly
github.com
github.com
Setup:
* An Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX was used for all logic, machine learning inference, art kiosk GUI etc.
* A StyleGAN was used to generate the artworks, trained on ~5k images of abstract art.
* A passive infrared sensor (SR602) was integrated with the Jetson to reduce screen burn-in. When no movement has been detected around the installation within a pre-defined threshold, the screen shuts off until movement is detected.
* A custom control box was built, encapsulating most of the electronics.
Right now it really feels like this isn't a priority. Which is fine.
But if it is a priority that other people replicate your work, I'm not sure you're making this as easy for people as possible.
If you could leverage AI to generate digital art based on real artist/photographer inputs, perhaps you could create a nice little marketplace business.. or maybe just a simple AI generator plugin for an existing marketplace..
Having said that, I'm curious and somewhat excited to see how these will evolve. As I said, I find them beautiful. As a painter myself there is nothing out there that will make me not paint. Sure, I sometimes use tools but there's always the me in there who is in control or driven by my human instinct.
It's already happening with social media profile pictures for instances. Next up could be the filler artworks in hotel rooms.
Generative art can be a wildly creative process on par with anything a painter works through. It's just a different medium.
The way you express yourself through art is not threatened by people choosing other ways using different tools. Painting did not become obsolete because someone invented art photography.
I do agree with the sentiment about NFT 'artists' though. Copy pasting a colab notebook, replacing a string and selling the result as NFT is just idiotic.
I wonder who the bigger fool is. The one who sells or the one who buys.
Demoscene Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
Wired article about the demo scene from 1995 https://www.wired.com/1995/07/democoders/
Curious -- since you're only doing the inference/generation on the frame, and since you're not doing it all the time, did you need a Jetson or would an RPI have sufficed? Did you test inference speeds across different edge compute options?
That would allow the frame to be somewhat lower power and also decrease ventilation requirements -- no fan needed.
https://dheera.net/projects/einkframe/
but also planning to use it for neural-net based generative art. I wasn't planning on putting a NX in it though, I was thinking of just keeping the Pi Zero in there and have it do all computations in "the cloud" or on a Nano/Xavier box sitting elsewhere on the same network.
I'm currently working on a 3-panel version of the above:
I didn't make my own frame though, I designed the dimensions and had it custom-built by a frame company, which was surprisingly affordable.
Requires drilling a fat hole in the wall to send the USB cable down behind the drywall but meh, needing to patch drywall when moving out isn't the end of the world, usually if you chat up the maintainence folk you can get some extra paint of exactly the right color and spackle/paint it yourself.
Was the E-ink screen simple to work with?
The documentation is sparse but they do have one C++ demo example and that's pretty much good enough as a reference to do whatever you want.
One thing I will caution is to NEVER unplug or plug the display while the board is powered on, I fried one display by doing that, but Waveshare was nice enough to replace it for free one I got a hold of some employee's WeChat.
I don't think much of the actually produced art, but the fact that you laid out your whole process makes this drool-worthy. Now it is just a challenge as to- can I do better?
Great job.
This one has how many gazillion photos?
Of course you can! Give it a try and share it afterwards ;)
Quick question: can you use the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX to train a model? Or can it only be used for inference?
This is sad, because wooden box building guides are abundant, but art generation guides are less so,
* They are incredibly expensive if you want ~32"
* I wasn't sure that it would've worked together with the Nvidia Xavier NX.
(Covered on HN in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900439)
This would make it less tv-isih
The common ones you can buy as “digital photo frame” on Amazon sucks in image quality. I would like a minimalistic digital photo display that is colour accurate, hidpi, preferably have a way to store a handful of hi res images(if not, Adding a Pi-zero for this is still okay). Oh I am not so rich or hosting an art gallery or anything, so, it must be less than 700 bucks(the cost of an iPad). I don’t understand why such a thing doesn’t exist already.
** https://slobots.com/2019/01/gallery-view-i-love-my-robot-at-...
What do you think of this? : https://vimeo.com/241051006
Also, here's a generative art discord : https://discord.gg/gVna7Utm
I wish more projects were like this ( as in, showed most of the steps ).
I really enjoy writing these guides for others to learn, it forces me to think more about the process :)
If you liked this one, I've also written another guide where I built a full-size arcade machine from scratch: https://github.com/maxvfischer/DIY-arcade
(I have a connection to Sweden, by the way. My brother lived in Eskilstuna in high school. So, I learned a little bit of Swedish when I visited him. His host brother thought it was really weird I met him and said "jag heter Chris, jag älska naturen!"). But, I would not feel comfortable talking to you in Swedish about StyleGAN. :) ).
Is a huge (5,000+ items) dataset required to get decent results?
I think it's quite likely that you will heavily overfit the network if you only use a handful of images, where it might end up reconstructing the exact paintings. I only have experience using 5,000+ images.
Then it's ready for the gallery.
Especially if you could come up with a way to filter out some of the images that look too much like how a random broken monitor will output.
This image in particular feels like "real" art to me. https://imgur.com/gaJVSs3
Rauschenberg too, as well as Lichtenstein and many others, wouldn't have liked it a bit being turned into some hotair egomaniac 0-creative wraped in plastic in some fin-groupies Schnabel'oesque or Koons'ian gallery spot
Personally I don't think a machine generating pixels from neural networks trained on intentional art can create art - it can create something that seems very similar because it seems to generate the same or similar output but its missing the process and intention of art. If an artist draws random shapes with no intention or intent to communicate or evoke thought/emotion, all they're doing is making shapes, unless the random shapes themselves are an intent to communicate something (which is difficult if they're actually random).
'art is art' is a tautology with no meaning, and defining art in a way that makes some things not art is the only way you can have a useful definition of art.
Change my tire? Art. Spill chocolate milk on the table? art. vomit after drinking too much? art. because art is art, right?
I guess the question is why you think everything, including things done without intention or intent to communicate, is art?
just my take on it, maybe it might provide a framework for seeing how even unintentional, stochastic processes can be conceived of as art. :)
Again, if you interpret changing a tire, spilling milk, or the vomiting after drinking too heavily as art, I disagree with you. Are traffic signs art, in and of themselves? are all signs art?
I don't think I agree with you. I've never read peirce and I don't do that 'argument from authority' thing, but given your wording here I don't think I agree with what you're saying.
>the art is the interpretant formulated by the interpreter,
So according to pierce, my interpretation of this as not as art is as valid as you thinking its art, since that's how im interpreting it? It doesn't seem like a very self consistent idea.
i get what you're suggesting here, and i would be inclined to say that i don't really appeal to someone I would personally consider authoritative as a means of validating my argument, but that being said, citing someone who was fairly prominent in a specific field of study in order to make a point based on their work in that field of study isn't really appealing to authority. it's like if i were to cite Stephen Hawking to make the claim that black holes slowly radiate out their content over time, that wouldn't necessarily be appealing to authority, it would just be citing someone who happened to be an expert in a specific field for their work in it. granted, there are better, more objective things to refer to than the hypothesis of hawking radiation to demonstrate the accuracy of it, but I think the analogy stands.
>So according to pierce, my interpretation of this as not as art is as valid as you thinking its art, since that's how im interpreting it?
precisely. that's the nature of the relationship between interpreter, signs, and the signified.
>It doesn't seem like a very self consistent idea.
that's because the idea isn't necessarily one specifically used to justify the validity of what constitutes art, it's more about categorizing the relationship between an interpretive entity and that which is being interpreted as a triple, namely as a sign (the conveyed meaning or intent), the signifier (the thing which the sign is referring to), and the intepretant (the personal interpretation formed by the interpreter in response to the sign+signifier.)
(note: apologies to anyone reading this if I haven't represented it fully accurately, im still in the process of integrating it completely, but I am confident my summation of it is generally correct)
the connection I made to the subjective interpretation of what constitutes valid art is just my own invocation of this idea in the specific context of art and the criticism thereof. it definitely is a very generalized approach to things, but it's important to note that this process of semiosis isn't about the specific outcome, but rather about the process that leads to it, and therfore despite our personal experiences with it being contradictory, the process itself that leads to it is self consistent, it's just that you bring something different to the process of interpretation than I do because of your own experience, your own Bayesian Net as it were.
In my mind, the interesting part in this installation is not necessarily the generated artworks, but rather the fact that they are one push of a button away from being deleted forever. It adds a consumable aspect to the installation, which I think is interesting. Can that evoke emotions and be art in itself?
But that being said, I don't look at myself as an artist. I'm a simple Data Scientist enjoying building projects at the intersection of technology, woodwork and art (whatever that is).
but how is that expressed or communicated through the installation? Why should anyone value random patterns generated by a machine that had no intention?
I find andy goldsworthy's art incredible, and he bases his work almost entirely on this idea of impermanent art (although his is usually found materials). I'm not sure its communicated by what you've presented.
I think the impermanence of random patterns that don't communicate anything is something you can find interesting rather than something thats communicated by the video screen, or the intention of the installation.
It's a cool project, but ya, still not sold on this being art per se.
*or when toilet flushes ;-)
Second, if your definition of art is unlimited, it's hardly useful, so I don't think it matters.
We could also call art, "byproducts of artistic (beauty-guided) action"