Art Inspired By Flight Sciences & AI
The following projects are inspired by interesting concepts in engineering and science and demonstrate these concepts in exciting and thought provoking ways.
Intension II
The "tensegrity" sculpture is located in the John Bardo Lobby at Wichita State University. The Shocker gold aluminum tubes appear to float because the cable can only support tension or pulling, NOT bending or compression; but in the sculpture it seems to support the structure by standing upright, which we all know a string or cable cannot do. “Tensegrity” means Tensional Integrity.
The term was coined by Buckminster Fuller, for a self-tensioning structure comprised of rigid parts (The gold tubes) and elastic parts (the connecting cables). The tension in the cable provided by the compression in the tubes results in mechanical stability, causing the rods to float within the structure.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) Art Generated by AI
A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a class of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. Two artificial neural networks compete with each other in to represent real data and forgeries. A gentle introduction to GAN can be found HERE.
Given a set of REAL data, a GAN learns to generate FORGERIES with the some of the same statistics as the real data. A GAN trained on a database of 30,000 celebrity headshots can generate new celebrity imposter headshots that look very much like the real celebrities to human observers.
A GAN has a generator (generates fakes) and a discriminator (that detects which are fake and which are real). Both are updated on the fly as data is fed to them. This means that the generator is trained to fool the discriminator and the discriminator is trained not to be fooled.
GANs are similar to genetic algorithms or evolutionary biology, with a survival competition between the real and fakes images and the discriminators ability to detect the fake ones.
A database of circle paintings created by various artists at a circle painting event was fed to a GAN. The ORIGINAL artwork can be found at Calvary Circles Amplified and at Calvary Circles.