Eunsu Kang, Chun-Liang Li, Songwei Ge, Austin Dill, Lingyao Zhang, Manzil Zaheer, Barnabas Poczos

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The Hallucinated Body of Ganymedes (2018)

Our team of artists and machine learning researchers designed a creative algorithm that can generate authentic sculptures. These artworks do not mimic any given forms and cannot be easily categorized into the labels of the training dataset. Our approach is inspired by the Google DeepDream for 2D images and extends it to 3D point clouds. After trying the naive DeepDream approach, we developed a new method, Amalgamated DeepDream (ADD) that leverages the properties of point clouds to create objects with better quality than the naive extension. ADD presents promise for the creativity of machines, the kind of creativity that pushes artists to explore novel methods or materials and to create new genres, for example transitioning from Realism to Abstract Expressionism or to Minimalism, instead of creating variations of existing forms or styles within one genre. We present the 3D printed sculptures based on the point clouds created by ADD.

The project title is inspired by the Ganymedes story in Homer’s Iliad. He “was the loveliest born of the race of mortals, and therefore the gods caught him away to themselves” and “for the sake of his beauty, so he might be among the immortals.” Now creative algorithms have begun to come to  us, mortals, for the sake of their endless creative possibilities, even perhaps bringing in beauty and meaning to our lives.

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