crea.visions Venice 2022
CREA Visions Venice is a collaborative event series between the Center of Hybrid Intelligence (Aarhus, Denmark), and the ACM Creativity & Cognition 2022 conference. Our aim is that the AI-assisted activity that crea.visions allows for can help anyone visualize the future of Venice. We also wish to spark dialogues and foster community action around sustainable development and the future of the city of Venice.
Training our GAN
crea.visions uses what is called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which is a type of machine learning framework. Since we wanted to create visions of Venice that resemble the city, we built a special version of the algorithm, which was trained on both images of building-like structures from Artbreeder’s website (the project that inspired the creation of crea.visions) and images taken in Venice by our local collaborators.
Some images from ArtBreeder:
Some pictures taken in Venice:
The images of Venetian buildings were then “translated” into a vector space that the GAN understands, which resulted in images like these:
These were then used as source images, and people could decide how much of each they wanted to include in their blended image.
In May ’22, we held pop-up events at various locations in the city of Venice. We introduced ourselves and our project and asked people to play with our game for a bit. We talked with local clubs, students, and tourists. Over the course of one week, 4668 images were generated, 235 submitted, and 70 ranked. The top 10 images will be exhibited in Giudecca, owned by Insituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, from 22-25 June, as part of the ACM Creativity & Cognition 2022 Conference Exhibition.
The winners
If you are located in Venice or around Venice and are interested in the exhibition, feel free to come by and check out the winning images!
The exhibition will take place in the Sala Camino exhibition space of the Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Campo San Cosmo, 621, Giudecca, 30133 Venezia. The nearest ACTV vaporetto stop is Giudecca Palanca.
The winning images
