Warning: this film features visual effects that could be unsuitable for photosensitive viewers.
Ghosts is part of an ongoing project in which the Istanbul-based media artist Vadim Epstein explores AI technology via animation. Epstein created the video’s trippy, shapeshifting visuals through a program called StarGAN v2, which uses a neural network to generate new images by pulling from a user-created dataset. The image-to-image technology is similar to what’s used to change one’s hair colour or age à la Snapchat face filters, but anyone who has tried re-inputting a filtered image back into a feed multiple times, as Epstein does here, knows that the results can get pretty strange. For the piece, Epstein built a dataset consisting of celebrity faces, cats, paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, pencil drawings and other artworks, creating a feedback loop of abstract art and digital information that builds upon itself in uncanny, unexpected ways. With StarGAN v2 given almost full control over the process, the result is an ever-changing wave of obscure and expressive visuals that seem unbound from the world of human art and aesthetics. It’s hard to predict what neural networks like StarGAN v2 will produce as machine learning technologies continue to develop, but Ghosts cleverly shows how far the technology has come, and how weird the results can (already) get.
Director: Vadim Epstein
video
Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
10 minutes
video
Fairness and equality
Visit the small Texas community that lives in the shadow of SpaceX launches
14 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes
video
War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes
video
Bioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
6 minutes
video
History of technology
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
19 minutes
video
Animals and humans
The wild tale of a young animal keeper, an angry tiger and a torn circle net
10 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Why single Chinese women are freezing their eggs in California
24 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes