
Artificial Intelligence and the Art of Mario Klingemann - hardmaru
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/artificial-intelligence-and-the-art-of-mario-klingemann
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rgovostes
I first encountered Mario's work more than a decade ago when he popped up in
the Processing community. Two of his from that time stand out as some of my
favorite pieces of generative art, but unfortunately require Java:

[http://incubator.quasimondo.com/processing/plankton.php](http://incubator.quasimondo.com/processing/plankton.php)

[http://incubator.quasimondo.com/processing/ornamism.php](http://incubator.quasimondo.com/processing/ornamism.php)

I've politely urged him on Twitter to describe how these work, but he tells me
these two are too precious for him to reveal the secret.

~~~
steve19
Java is easily decompiled if you really want to know.

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raymond_goo
I am looking for someone who can help me create (or help me get started to
create) a GAN that generates H.R. Giger style pictures. Anyone up for helping
me out ?

~~~
gwern
Use StyleGAN. The speed and quality of its results surpass any GAN I've ever
used, and I've used dozens of different implementations of various
architectures and tweaked them over the past 3 years.

If you want a demo of what it can do and the original Nvidia paper/video isn't
impressive enough, check out the anime faces I've been generating with just a
few days of training on my 2 GPUs:
[https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1093701790971953152](https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1093701790971953152)

For H.R. Giger pictures, I suspect the problem is that you simply don't have
enough. StyleGAN is powerful enough to memorize datasets of under a few
thousand images. What I would suggest is that you might be able to take the
Nvidia 1024px face model or cat model and retrain the model with your artwork;
that saves you sample size, and to the extent that faces or cats remain in
your final model, well, perhaps that will just make it creepier or hilarious,
in the vein of 'dogslugs'.

(This is what I have been doing to make individual-character anime-face
StyleGAN models: few characters have so many faces as to be able to train from
scratch, so I've trained a StyleGAN on the entire face dataset, and then I
simply retrain it for an hour or two on just that individual character's faces
to finetune it.)

Alternately, you could try to borrow strength from an illustration dataset
somewhat similar, maybe a Western art dataset like WikiArt? (I forget if
WikiArt is the dataset OP mentions Mario training his GANs on.) Train a
StyleGAN on that and then do transfer to Giger as above.

Finally, you could get more invasive and try to weaken StyleGAN enough to make
memorization more difficult when training from scratch. Shrink the 8x512 FC
layer stack and remove filters from the convolutions, for example. It will be
a lot weaker but it'll generalize better within the samples it's still able to
generate. Train faster/smaller too.

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raymond_goo
Wow, thanks for the thorough reply!

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lpasselin
30 to 40k estimated price... For a GAN displaying outputs on a tv? I'm sure
this can be built in a weekend.

I really hope he sells it at a high price.

~~~
nkozyra
Far more has been paid for canvas, a few slivers of pine and a single color of
paint.

The value of art is not something you can quantify this way.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Value of Art = Value of Art Marketing

For something like this, anyway. The point isn't that anyone could build it in
a weekend, but that someone with the contacts and the required
business/commercial network knew how to build it and sell it.

It will probably be bought as investment with a view to profit on resale.

