Re: Temporality - Flowers

Daffodil

Re: Temporality is an exploration of the reinterpretation of time through the lens of AI. Generative AI models are trained on large amounts of information in specific circumstances, and therefore are almost human-level experts in some domains while completely lacking in other areas. While the areas of expertise are interesting, the ways that AI fills in the gaps outside its domain can be uniquely fascinating. The area I want to explore for this project is in smart interpolation. If you give certain AI models two very similar images of the same scene, it can generate a reasonable set of events between the two images. However, if the images are too different, AI bridges the gap in surprising and mesmerizing ways. By integrating real naturalistic time lapses, cutting out transitional moments, and forcing AI to fill in the dots, we can see alternate growth paths, play with our own latent expectations of liminality, and see a reimagined cause and effect tree from the perspective of AI. The result is often unexpected or even eerie, but interesting and beautiful in its own right.

Branch

I created this piece to explore this theme through an AI reinterpretation of time-lapse video of flowers blooming. I used FILM (Frame Interpolation for Large Motion) to interpolate between a set of key frames of time lapses of blooming flowers. I included certain frames to best allow the model to both coherently follow the blooming of the flower while also allowing it space to make interesting mistakes in reconstruction of the blooming timelapse.

Crocus