Professor Graham’s Museum of Eldritch Antiquities

Posted on by Shawn
The more I study computational creativity the more I’ve come to the conclusion that whether something is perceived as creative or not says a lot about us as humans and less about our algorithms. Or to introduce another idiom: creativity is in the eye of the beholder
 
https://twitter.com/mark_riedl/status/1421839552868667392

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At night, the statues would come alive

...in Professor Graham’s Museum of Eldritch Antiquities. “Come – come!” he gestures. You enter a room; the darkness in the air shimmers…

As you walk along, you become aware of a faint clicking noise. “Now, in this room – please don’t get too close to the glass, ha ha, it’s only one pane thick – we have some lovely Greek kraters…”
 
His voice drops to a whisper. “best to just keep on walking past the next gallery. Don’t make eye contact; whatever you do.’
 
 
It turns a baleful…eye? towards you. The cold certain knowledge drops into your brain. There is no escape. A noise from the other gallery distracts it momentarily, and your feet decide to flee. “Wait!” he yells, “You can only exit through the gift shoppe! It is most curious!”
 
 
Bewildered, you run down one evershifting corridor into another, until you crash into a dead-end wall…. and somehow, push through to the outside world. Panting, you stare up at the monstrous edifice…
 
 
At least you got a postcard from Professor Graham’s Museum of Eldritch Antiquities. Looking closely, you see it was painted by someone W someone Bl
 
 
You squint at the words at the bottom, trying to frame your lips around the unfamiliar syllabus, momentarily forgetting they’re likely cursèd. It is the last mistake you make. /fin.
 
~
 
generative art. yeah, the computer pumps out the pixels, but figuring out how to _drive_ the computer to somewhere interesting, somewhere you want to go: there’s the art.
 
https://twitter.com/electricarchaeo/status/1421241186044452864
 
The top image in each pair was the starting place for a VQGAN+CLIP generative experiment; the bottom image is a still from the resulting movie. You can see the way the images emerge starting at this post. I’m exploring the spaces that the machine(s) ‘know’. Below, a simple prompt, ‘an archaeologist in the field’, drawing on the wikiart image model.
 
No conclusions in this post; experiments ongoing.