Every week the AI workgroup that I’m working in tries to give each other feedback on the projects we’re individually working on.
Last week I presented the online AI Pixel art gallery. I outlined the creation of this in my previous blog post.
Among the feedback were interesting ideas such as:
- Create a batch of images that have a common theme or a common input
- Let an AI generate the titles of the generated images
- Play with the physical size of the images
- Take the work seriously, how would this look in a museum?
- Have some element of interactivity
- Try to go analogue
- Show the process and the errors
- Have more playful experimentation, more weird things
More important to me however, was seeing the immediate unfiltered reaction of my classmates and teachers. I noticed that my showcase of the website almost immediately turned into a ‘game’, classmates and teachers trying to guess the input phrases of the generated images.
I liked the idea of iterating on this ‘game’, it seemed fun to me, but the idea proved too gimmicky for some.
So I decided I would have to do something serious.
I have taken this into account and came up with the idea at least for now;
To create a very fancy classical looking painting like you might see in the old parts of a museum with the help of AI.
I want to achieve this by taking an old square display, stripping it to its flat panel, attaching a raspberry pi to it and then having that look nice in a large wooden frame.
If you have trouble picturing this I came across this scary project that also made a digital painting frame from a raspberry pi.
After looking around online I noticed that perfectly square displays are rather rare, and very expensive. However 1280 × 1024 (5:4) displays are everywhere. And all this would require to make it square would just be an adjustment to the frame that goes in front of the display.
So I went ahead and ordered a cheap lcd display (an Acer AL1951Cs) from a second hand electronics store.
When it arrived I immediately started stripping the electronics inside. And now I have a working loose display, with a controller board ready to be connected to my raspberry pi. I’m still waiting for a HDMI to VGA adapter to hook it all up.
Next I will have to design the painting frame and a figure out a way to hold the whole assembly together. A little tricky since I’m at home with due to COVID, fun!