Lost Skies Through the Eyes of Believers vs Skeptics
Lost Skies is an art series of AI-generated images expressing the essence of the collective gaze at the nature affected by climate change.
LOST SKIES THROUGH THE EYES OF THE BELIEVERS vs SKEPTICS
Lost Skies is an art series composed of AI-generated images that express the collective perspective on nature in the wake of climate change. The project was created by Maja Petric in collaboration with computer scientist Mihai Jalobeanu.
In 2016, they developed an artificial intelligence tool known as AIEye, which combines vast amounts of images found on the Internet into unique archetypal images. Each climate change phenomenon is presented through the eyes of climate change believers and skeptics, offering a visual representation of the public's conflicting views on the environment's current state.
AIEye is trained on Maja's aesthetic and predates the AI tools like MidJourney and DaLLE that emerged in 2022, making the project a pioneer in AI-generated art. It was recognized in scientific publications and featured in international computer science conferences such as The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), etc.
Photo by Robert Herrick
Lost Skies has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, BBC, and The Seattle Times, underscoring its relevance and the urgency of its message. Furthermore, these pieces were exhibited in the FOR-SITE’s exhibition LANDS END alongside renowned artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Doug Aitken, Andy Goldsworthy, Teresita Fernandez, and other leading contemporary artists depicting the effects of climate change.
The AIEye algorithm (2016) searches the internet for thousands of images of the world affected by climate change-related phenomena such as air pollution, global warming, overpopulation, deforestation, etc. 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. It 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. In so, the outcome is not a mere collage of thousands of images found on the internet but an algorithmically processed essence of all the images.
View HERE gallery feature of the Lost Skies on BBC.
Each image is printed on canvas and displayed as a light box or a framed giclee print.
Dimensions (light boxes): 96 x 48 x 5 in / 243.8 x 121.9 x 12.7 cm
Dimensions (framed giclee prints): 36 x 18 x 0.5 in / 91.5 x 45.5 x 1.3 cm
Software: Mihai Jalobeanu
Year: 2016-