Culture and Artificial Intelligence
This is an interactive installation piece with a machine generated face transformation done in real time on a webcam input, based on training the machine on traditional dance rituals from the southern Indian state of Kerala.
The video output is not very smooth here because i was running this neural network on a not so powerful GPU. With something beefier (like an NVIDIA 1080Ti), this would be much smoother.
Please refer to the masked reality project for more details about Indian masks related work.
Here’s collected works from an ongoing experiment around cultural objects and artificial intelligence. Can we teach machines about different cultures, and as a result make that a medium for us to discover different cultures. Can this lead to ‘exploration through creation’, where a computer presents us with different cultural designs and patterns as we sketch different objects. The larger goal of this is also to question the cultural background of AI, based on what datasets we use to train it.
Following is early beginnings, where i input various Japanese and African vases to a computer. When a person sketches a vase shape, the computer presents them 2 outputs- with Japanese kind of patterns and African ones. (NB- this is in no way an extensive study of cultural patterns and their meanings).
Something similar with masks.