I continue to collaborate artistically with an artificial intelligence. The future is now.

• Many thanks to the Deep Dream Generator for hosting a free web interface to allow anyone to play around with training a neural network to create artwork (and thanks Google for the underlying open source code - install it locally from GitHub here).

• Previous installments in this series: Gallery #1; Gallery #2 (not named as such); my insanely detailed Deep Dream Generator tutorial; and the post that started it all.

Dreaming of the Willamette

Recently I have been working on a series inspired by the Willamette River that runs a few a blocks from my house. I have been taking photographs of the Willamette with the express purpose in mind of running them through the Deep Dream Generator. I crop out sections of the photographs that I think will work well with the AI, and in some cases I have also done some image manipulation in PhotoShop both before running an image through the generator and afterward on the output.

Blue Heron at Dusk

I am quite pleased with how this one turned out. I took this picture after dusk, the heron was perfectly silhouetted against the reflections in the river from the lights on a bridge. The photo itself is dark and blurry but that actually often makes for a good candidate to use for deep dream generation - the AI can take some creative liberties when the source image is a little fuzzy. To the right is the style image I used to train the neural network - I was hoping for a stained glass effect and it worked well. I set enhance to high, depth to deep, weight to 60%, and scale to 80% to create this image. I also used the clone stamp tool in PhotoShop to fix some sections that did not come through cleanly and manipulated saturation and vibrancy in the reflections of light on the water.

My original photo of the great blue heron at dusk for reference:

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Sunset on the Willamette

I posted this piece previously as the cover image of an instrumental soundtrack song.

This is a great example of my technique - I took a number of pictures of sunset reflections on the river one evening and cropped out interesting sections to play around with in the Deep Dream Generator. The original cropped section of photograph is above right; the style image I used is below right. I was going for an oil or pastel painting look with thick, visible brushstrokes so I chose my style image accordingly.

This one I did not manipulate at all in PhotoShop, this is the pure output from the Deep Dream Generator. Most of the artistic work here was in cropping the original photograph to create an interesting composition with areas of light in the reflections to draw the viewer's eye around the final "painting". Sometimes working with the Deep Dream Generator feels like cheating. I think this is a genuinely interesting piece of digital art and I created it in a few minutes between taking the photo, selecting and cropping it, and running it through the Deep Dream Generator.

Some more from the same series of photographs (different cropped base images and different style images):

Sunset on the Willamette #2

Sunset on the Willamette #3

Ripples Over a Log

I took another series of photos to use for this project, this time focusing on close-up shots of ripples in shallow water. Here I cropped a section of water flowing over a log and manipulated the original photo a little to create more depth of contrast. The style image (see below right) is the same style image used for Sunset on the Willamette #2 above.

I cropped this section of photograph because the micro-currents and eddies underneath the mini-waterfall coursing over the log are really interesting. I was hoping they would translate well into brushstrokes and I am not disappointed with the results.

You can see how using a different style image can really change the results by comparing the images below (same base image, different style images) with the image above. This is not just a simple "filter" a la Instagram or Picsart. The AI creates a new thing, draws new lines, selects new colors, in similar fashion to a human artist asked to recreate a reference image (base image) in the style of a particular master (style image).

Ripples Over a Log #2

Ripples Over a Log #3

Ripples Over a Log #4

Willamette Abstraction

In the same series of photos that resulted in the Ripples Over a Log series, I took some more abstract shots of crossing ripple patterns on shallow water. With less depth and contrast in these images, they worked well for a more abstract final result using various geometric and organic patterns as style image.

I actually like some of the base images I used for this abstraction series on their own - water ripples are really interesting :)

Stay tuned for more!

This is really just scratching the tip of my Deep Dream Generator obsession. I have also been creating small (post-it note sized) original pen and ink cross-hatch drawings and using them as base images to create some pretty crazy final results (crazy in that it is hard to believe the level of detail in the final output came from a post-it note sized drawing in the first place).

Here is a sneak peak at a piece of art I made for my @cyclops blog. I have created many variants of this, none published yet. Original post-it note art of cyclops:

Cyclops Woodcut style with cave background created from above image:

Happy deep dreaming! Much love - Carl