Glimpse of the Singularity

Directed by taramoves
Tools: Unreal Engine 5, Runway ML Gen 1, Midjourney, Adobe After Effects
Claire AI Contest Submission, 2023

Artists, what do you see on the creative horizon? What do you feel when you look at it? Can you bear the sight?

DIRECTOR’S NOTE:

“Glimpse the Singularity” embodies my feelings of excitement and disorientation as I glimpse the infinite possibilities of the futures of AI visual generation. It also serves as a point of inquiry for a recurring question in this emerging medium - how much of the work is a collaboration with the technology (including its training data and the technologists that built it) and how much is the unique creative vision of the artist? Expanding my arts practice into new technological horizons, the question of authorship has been ever present, but with AI this becomes a more urgent question - the technology itself projects millions of creative visions within each attempt to generate something novel. In this piece I attempt to engage with authorial uncertainty, pushing the AI to conform to highly defined and self-authored influences and but still upholding the surprising playfulness of the AI’s interpretation of my requests.

Eyes animated in Unreal Engine 5 used as raw footage for RunwayML Gen 1.

Cliffs scene rendered through Runway ML Gen 1 with foreground only settings, using style transfer of geometric cities image from Midjourney (see below).

Eyes rendered through Runway ML Gen 1 with style transfer of an illustration (see below).

Cliffs with butterflies scene rendered through Runway ML Gen 1, using style transfer of fauvist cities image from Midjourney (see below).