Vadim Epstein

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Terminal Blink (2020)

Experiment:
Human faces (as the most presented subject in CV practice) were produced with StyleGAN2 FFHQ model, finetuned on Bauhaus-inspired squarish architecture of XX century, which reduced their identity into impersonal gray-concrete looks. Those ‘faceless’ faces were processed with StarGAN2 models, trained on multiple visual art sources – from Kandinsky to engravings – to apply diverse imaginative representations. These representations appeared heavily revised by the machine, since StarGAN2 results get quite far from plain style transfer.

Conclusion:
We treat Machine Vision hereby as insight (rather than eyesight) concept. Produced synthetic imagery is following familiar artistic tendencies yet; it may go way beyond, as soon as we’re ready to welcome that. The original song in soundtrack perceives human life as a single blink between past and future; the human-biased aesthetics may fit even shorter timeframe, as seen by silicon creations.

Sound by https://facebook.com/lovedmyth

Source code:
https://github.com/NVlabs/stylegan2   [prime source]
https://github.com/clovaai/stargan-v2  [effects]
https://github.com/NathanUA/U-2-Net [masking]

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