Melete
Melete is an interactive video installation telling a personal story about drawing, machine learning, data and failure. The installation documents a long-running project to build a dataset of drawings and experiment with machine learning algorithms.
This “interactive video installation” is viewable by a single participant at a time and lasts 15 minutes. It consists of alternate narration and drawing exercises.
The installation runs automatically, and is managed by an openFrameworks application. The video is split between a projector and a Wacom graphics tablet. The drawings made by the participants are captured and plotted as part of the installation.
Background
Drawing is a deeply intuitive, dare I say, philosophical exercise. A draftsman makes hundreds of decisions as she translates a scene in front of her into a series of lines on a page. Is the complexity and artistry of this process something a machine can hope to recreate?
Over a period of many years, I have explored, largely unsuccessfully, the potential for recurrent neural networks to work with lines and drawings. I believe it is important to capture drawings as a series of lines not as arrays of pixels. In this way, the essential nature and timing of each mark is better captured, allowing neural networks to better learn and abstract from the underlying process. At its most abstract, I am interested in how a relationship might develop between the machine and the artist if the machine is allowed to intervene interactively.
But machine learning algorithms need data and time, and when no data exists, you have to generate and collect it yourself. As it turns out, that means lots of programming and lots of drawing. Perhaps there are lessons in the act of drawing itself we can meditate on whilst we diligently generate the data?”
Media
Collaborators
- Artist — Meredith Thomas
- Body Artist — Karolina Mirsky
- Voice actor — Gilda Coustier