Longing in Time of Corona
AI-generated images made to epitomize people’s craving for closeness during the pandemic, after having suffered the effects of a lack of human touch.
LONGING IN TIME OF CORONA
While people around the world were socially distancing to prevent the further spread of coronavirus, many have suffered the effects of a lack of human touch. These computer-generated images are made to epitomize people’s craving for closeness during the pandemic. To achieve the all-encompassing perspective on the widespread touch deprivation, Maja employed a custom artificial intelligence system, AIEye, to combine numerous points of view into individual archetypal images. It is not a mere collage but an algorithmically processed essence of all the images of touch that AIEye found on the internet.
The AIEye algorithm searches the internet for thousands of images of human touch during COVID-19. The algorithm then processes all the found images, analyzes their salient properties, and summarizes the data into one image. It sifts, learns, and reasons through massive amounts of data that no human would ever be able to review.
The AIEye algorithm is based on a non-standard use of various deep learning strategies. It is the result of extensive experimentation in generating images with Maja’s aesthetic that is inspired by impressionist landscape painting. The algorithm performs a stochastic search for a representative combination of pixels (the generated image) and uses batches of input images from a large set, further augmented using simple image transformations. Each input image has a small, incremental contribution to the result, determined by a cost function and a learning rate parameter.
Software: Mihai Jalobeanu
Year: 2020