This post is one in a series about GANce

In collaboration with Won Pound for his forthcoming album release via minaret records I was recently commissioned to lead an expedition into latent space, encountering intelligences of my own haphazard creation.

A word of warning:

This and subsequent posts as well as the GitHub etc. should be considered toy projects. Development thus far has been results-oriented, with my git HEAD following the confusing and exciting. The goal was to make interesting artistic assets for Won’s release, with as little bandwidth as possible devoted to overthinking the engineering side. This is a fun role-reversal, typically the things that leave my studio look more like brushes than paintings. In publishing this work, the expected outcome is also inverted from my typical desire to share engineering techniques and methods; I hope my sharing the results shifts your perspective on the possible ways to bushwhack through latent space.

So, with that out of the way the following post is a summary of development progress thus far. Here’s a demo:

There are a few repositories associated with this work:

• GANce, the tool that creates the output images seen throughout this post.
• Pitraiture, the utility to capture portraits for training.

If you’re uninterested in the hardware/software configurations for image capture and GPU work, you should skip to Synthesizing Images.

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