The Imitation Game
The Imitation Game surveys the extraordinary uses (and abuses) of artificial intelligence (AI) in the production of contemporary visual culture. The exhibition follows a chronological narrative that first examines the development of artificial intelligence from the 1950s to the present. - Vancouver Artgallery
My Role: Work on the organization and production of digital assets for the Exhibition's projects connected with the Centre for Digital Media (CDM), including: (1) the Exhibition's AI Introduction Wall; (2) the Exhibition's associated digital publication; (3) other related parts of the Exhibition.
I also authored two installations that borrow from the pepper's ghost, intially these were supposed to be anamorphic optical illusions but ended up being plain optical illusions due to the millions of videos I was preparing. More below.
Team: I worked with senior curator Bruce Grenville and co-curator Glenn Entis, along with many talented personnels involved in creating, curating and installing the various moving parts of the entire exhibition.
Pepper's Cone
One of the challenges I faced was to author CGI for stationary conical displays as described by Roxanne Luo in her paper for Pepper's Cone. I pulled the git repository posted by her and rendered footage suitable for a conical surface the unity project file was caliberated for.
Repo: https://github.com/roxanneluo/Pepper-s-Cone-Unity
Apart from my horrific camera quality, the imagery worked well when projected from iPads. However, it was not caliberated to use bigger screens, and due to a limited inventory of displays available for the exhibition, and the lack of available time for all the mathematical calculations needed to caliberate this imagery onto bigger custom built cones, we settled for the classic Pepper's Ghost approach for these installations.
The anamorphic videos were rendered and played back as a render texture in the pepper's cone unity project before capturing the footage to be played on the iPad.
Mountain of Assets
My main duty was sourcing, editing, looping and assisting curation of the digital media for exhibition displays. These pieces ranged widely from: documentaries, excerpts from movies, excerpts from interviews, playthroughs, promos, slideshows, and specially produced videos. With more than 50 total videos, special care was put into the design language of each genre.
For example, a subtle shadow was added to subtitles in movie excerpts to improve legibility.
Sometimes the assets would be iterated upon multiple times. So, to keep things clear and avoid any confusion among the team responsible for installation, I divided the asset directories and maintained a documentation with set guidelines.
GANs Illustrated (3:36)
This video graphic was co-authored by Glenn Entis, Isabella Pu and Adam Finkelstein. It illustrates how GANs aka Generative Adversarial Networks can be used to synthesize plausible imagery, in this case, of cats.
I had the humble opportunity to compile the audio and video together for this talented group of people.