0DayDreams
Description
When in thought, we often doodle or sketch little shapes or pattern. 0DayDream explores the space of machine day- dream doodles. A neural net generates little sketches over and over. They are drawn in white on a black background utilizing a minimalistic brush simulation. Older sketches fade away to make room for new daydream doodles. The neural net is not trained on a large dataset. Instead it is inspired by a single human sketch. Visitors are able to draw and show new inspirations to the AI. The model is steadily trained on the last human inspiration sketch. So the knowledge of older human drawings fades over time and the installation is in a steady flow of new doodles and inspirations.
The project is built with Pytorch and Paper.js. The in- stallation consists of one monitor to display the AI drawing process and one device with pen input, that gives visitors the ability to draw new inspiration sketches for 0DayDream. The neural net architecture is a transformer encoder with top-k sampling. The human-drawn inspiration sketch is augmented to create a dataset suitable for training the transformer. After each drawing of 0DayDream, a new epoch is trained with the current template sketch dataset. The generated dataset for each epoch is explicitly kept small, so the training advances slower and more interesting mixed model states can be explored by the observer. See figure 3 for a transition from a spiral-filled sketch to a sketch containing lot’s of nested boxes.
The artwork is inspired by my research on path-based image generation using one-shot learning and directly builds on-top of it. The application of AI to creative design processes is a fascinating subject to me, especially if no large training datasets are required. Collecting large datasets is a costly task and can not be performed by everyone. Time, money or other limited resources might prevent people from creating their own models with own datasets. In my opinion, AI should be accessible to everyone: not only the use but also the creation. Therefore one- and few-shot learning is especially interesting to me. 0Daydream uses only one inspirational image to advance the model and watching the drawing process is exciting and very calming at the same time. How is my sketch used to create new daydream drawing?
Video Documentation
Model State Example
visitor draws
AI draws on wall
On Display