Augenblick

Lunar Ring

September 15-19, 2021 / Interactive Installation, Moritzburghof Halle, Germany

New forms of experience are enabled by creative human-machine interaction at the Silbersalz Festival.

The Experience

Augenblick hosted a variety of artistic performances—some planned, some spontaneous. The audience experienced unique interactions of the AI-system with music, dancing, clownery, and storytelling.

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The Process

Deep autoencoders (VQ-GAN and style-attention networks) performed video neural style-transfer in real time, parallelized over four A100-GPUs of an NVIDIA DGX™ Station. YOLO and CLIP allowed automatic zooming to regions of interest.

A range of parameters to steer the artistic transformation could be changed in real time using a GUI and a MIDI controller.

The requirements for streaming cameras were best fulfilled by an array of second-hand android smartphones. They enabled fast wireless streaming and the ability to adjust to changing light and weather conditions. One phone was installed inside an eye-like styrofoam ball, peeking out through the pupil. An extra battery pack and a stone as weights provided the proper orientation.

Lunar Ring

Lunar Ring is an AI art collective from Tübingen, Germany. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Loktyushin, Johannes Stelzer, Mirko Franjic, and Niklas Fricke, the core mission of Lunar Ring is to explore new emergent forms of creativity. The interplay between human and machine creativity enables entirely new forms of experiences, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Lunar Ring engages the public through interactive installations and exhibitions in public spaces and museums.

With a strong scientific background in physics, neuroscience, and machine learning, Lunar Ring incorporates the latest developments from AI research. Like a creative reactor, it combines exploration and realization and collaborates with leading scientists and performing artists.

Lunar-Ring.ai | Instagram

Featured Sessions

AI Enables a New Form of Performance Art at Silbersalz Science Festival

How can artificial intelligence enable a new form of performance art? And what’s the technical implementation behind it? We'll tell the story behind Augenblick, the central art piece of this year’s Silbersalz Science and Media festival. Here, we installed a 350+ inch screen behind the stage area of a medieval castle located in Halle, Germany. We connected the screen to a local supercomputer, which created a real-time artistic transformation using multiple camera views from the stage and audience. The result is a new stage set, co-created by humans and artificial intelligence. Various acts, such as dancing, theater, literature reading, and music performances were transformed and mirrored back simultaneously using art-generating neural networks.

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