Portraits of imaginary people

A work in progress by Mike Tyka:

For a while now I’ve been experimenting with ways to use generative neural nets to make portraits.

Adding a third stage allows upressing up to 4k. However I dont have any actual training data at that resolution, meaning the network only learns to generally predict smooth edges etc, It can’t know the details of what skin pores or eyelashes look like. A super-highres database of faces would be needed here. Still for purposes of printing it’s nicer to create some interesting looking artifacts at this resolution, rather than bilinear interpolation of just pixelation.

Anyways, the goal is to make these into printable physical-world art pieces but I found in practice the resolution and detail has to be pretty high or it just doesn’t look nice printed. Like I said, it’s all work in flux and progress, more soon.

(via waxy)

See also

• Sunspring: a short film written by an algorithm — filmmaker Oscar Sharp turned to his technologist collaborator Ross Goodwin to build a machine that could write screenplays.
• Blooms: Strobe animated sculptures — Clever 3-D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light.
• Wellcome Image Awards 2015: The art behind the science of life, death, sex, and disease —
  The best in science imaging talent and techniques.