Machine Learning Meets Art to Reflect a Broader Community

Revisiting our 2018 installation, the Style Transfer Gallery, launched at Tom Tom Festival in Virginia. A central theme of the festival was “learn to see your world in a new way.” We took inspiration from that ethos to create a pop up art gallery that gave viewers the opportunity to view the world through the eyes of an artist.

Gallery visitors selected an artistic style including four local artists (see our post re: Artist Consent & AI) then activated a photo booth style countdown. Their images, captured throughout the festival, were immediately added to the ephemeral physical gallery and a persistent digital tapestry of the community hosted on social media.

The gallery engaged, celebrated and elevated visitors as both artwork and artist. It was critical for the experience’s success to create an approachable space that invited discovery and exploration. We find that all too often, tech is lauded merely for its novelty, rather than the innovative things it can accomplish. Our aim was to create a fun and engaging experience facilitated by machine learning, not about machine learning.