Year: 2022

Won Pound by Won Pound is released!

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This post is one in a series about GANce

Close-readers, twitter-followers and corporeal-comrades will have already beheld the good news that Won Pound by Won Pound has been released! This is Won’s second album-length project (first of course being Post Space released in 2018), and graces listener’s ears courtesy of Minaret Records, a California jazz label.

The record is accompanied by an album-length music video synthesized with GANce, containing a completely unique video for each track. These 93960 frames have been the ultimate goal of this project since it’s inception, and serve as the best demonstration as to what GANce can do. Within the video (linked below), the video for ‘buzzz’ is a personal favorite, demonstrating the three core elements of a projection file blend:

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GANce Overlays

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This post is one in a series about GANce

As it stood, the three main features that would comprise the upcoming collaboration with Won Pound (slated for release mid-April) were:

  • Projection Files (using a styleGAN2 network to project each of the individual frames in a source video, resulting in a series of latent vectors that can be manipulated and fed back into the network to create synthetic videos)
  • Audio Blending (using alpha compositing to combine a frequency domain representation of an audio signal with a series of projected vectors)
  • Network Switching (feeding the same latent vector into multiple networks produced in the same training run, resulting in visually similar results)

As detailed in the previous post. The effect of these three features can be seen in this demo:

 

Knowing we had enough runway to add another large feature to the project, and feeling particularly inspired following a visit to Clifford Ross’ exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art, I began exploring the relationship between the projection source video and the output images synthesized by the network.

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Recycling an Old Friend

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This post first appeared on Patreon.

There’s a triple-point energy to working on something out at the edge of your abilities. Enumerated alongside the possibilities for failure are visions of the finished piece, installed and gloriously humming along, that make the long nights ahead less intimidating.

In late October of 2018, I began the CAD for such a project. Telapush had just closed our largest deal to date. We were to contracted to build a massive illuminated sign that would map social media interactions to custom animations to be displayed in real time. The piece was to run, un-attended for the entire month of December in the Center Court of the Prudential Center mall, inside of Boston’s most distinctive skyscraper.

Erin and I had been pouring effort into Telapush for some time, and this installation was to be the largest tangible result from that effort. Serious people spending real money and expecting actual results. Boston was my new home and I felt that this project was my chance to make a good first impression to this new and intimidating place. This heightened importance, paired with the reverence for the challenge, coaxed out some good engineering; the project was a rousing success. More details about this installation can be found in my portfolio entry on the project.

Luckily, one element of the installation that I was able to retain possession of after the installation concluded was the LED matrix. An overwhelming array of 1215 addressable LEDs, and a 100W power supply to drive them.

Still brimming with usefulness, and valuable as a totem commemorating the successful project, the light bar was filed into storage. Unfortunately, I lacked the bandwidth and inspiration to pick it back up. In the past few months however, on quiet nights, I could hear it calling out to me from the crawlspace, pleading to be reanimated. And after a few years of rest, this post describes how this favorite project is given a new lease on life to enhance my 3D printing workflow.

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