Catherine Coyle – Looking Outwards 02

In this week’s Looking Outwards I wanted to talk about the pix2pix project. I had considered writing about this one for last week but I think it fits well with the generative art theme.

Essentially, pix2pix is a program that takes a simple line drawing, interprets what it is meant to look like, and turns it into a computer generated ‘oil painting.’ The entire program works because of artificial intelligence and procedural machine learning of scanning thousands of pictures in order to know how to interpret our drawings.

It seems that the more lines and detail that are added to your drawing, the better the result will be. The program doesn’t know as much how to handle a lot of blank space which leads to some funny (or horrifying results). This program started at a Dutch broadcasting company called NPO, but the code is open source and it has expanded greatly. I feel as though this computer generated art can be whatever we make of it, and really shows the amazing power of machine learning.

This video demonstrates in more detail how the program works and provides many interesting examples of the generative art.

There is a free demo that anyone can access from their browser! Feel free to try and make your own generative creations here.