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Artificial Intelligence and Poetry Film

Ian Gibbins is a poet, video artist, and electronic musician living on Kaurna land in Adelaide, South Australia. He has four books of poetry, and his videos have been shown to acclaim worldwide in festivals, galleries, installations, and public art programs. Until he retired in 2014, Ian was an internationally recognized neuroscientist and Professor of Anatomy.


In this video Ian shares some fascinating and generous insights into the technical aspects of making The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself.


The life we live is a series of illusions… a fleeting smile… mistaken decisions… dangerous, unpredictable… yet, we will meet again, as lovers… parents… children… and you will know who I am… Ian Gibbins

The complete video is here:


Tasos Sagris’s poem, with its haunting soundtrack by Whodoes, offers us an extended exploration of lives lived in parallel, at cross-purposes, in and out of love, around the world, from the innocence of children to the wisdom of elders. There are the good times when summer seems to last forever, and the bad, when persecution and misadventure could land us in prison, with nothing but rain to hear our voice. But what is the reality? What is mere illusion? Can there be more to life than simply living? The raw footage for the video was shot mainly in and around the city of Adelaide, its suburbs, the nearby Fleurieu Peninsula and Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, supplemented with images from around Greece. But nothing in the video is quite as it seems. Most scenes have been composited and animated from multiple sources. So we look down a city laneway and see friends walking along a beach. Storm clouds, ominously aglow, gather behind skylines. And after the rain, floodwater surges across plazas, covers the floors of ruined buildings. Who inhabits these strange places? Whom will we meet there? Look carefully in the malls and side-streets: we can see our fellow walkers, and then, again, again… And in windows of city buildings, in old frames hung on walls of broken brick and cracked concrete, we see the faces of the young and old, the boys and girls, the men and women of our imagination, our desires, our reconstructed memories. As alluring as they seem, none of them is real. Rather, they are the product of artificial intelligence, trained on thousands of our fellow humans, and generated by cold, unfeeling algorithms. Who inhabits these strange places? Whom will we meet there? Look carefully in the malls and side-streets: we can see our fellow walkers, and then, again, again… And in windows of city buildings, in old frames hung on walls of broken brick and cracked concrete, we see the faces of the young and old, the boys and girls, the men and women of our imagination, our desires, our reconstructed memories. As alluring as they seem, none of them is real. Rather, they are the product of artificial intelligence, trained on thousands of our fellow humans, and generated by cold, unfeeling algorithms. AI-generated faces that change facial expressions, age, and skin color demonstrate the illusory nature of the world surrounding us. The idea that all the faces in the video are not real matches the text and contrasts with the composited actions of actual people. Ian Gibbins

Credits

Videography / Compositing / Editing / Direction: Ian Gibbins

Poetry / Spoken Word: Tasos Sagris

Music: created by Whodoes

Artificial face generation: Generated Media, Inc3D models: Sketchfab.comAudio mastering: Stefan Torto

Produced by The Institute for Experimental Arts in Athens.


I also used them in another successful video, An Introduction to the Theory of Eclipses:

Eclipse (n. countable and uncountable)

1. An alignment of astronomical objects whereby one object comes between the observer and another object.

2. A seasonal state of plumage in some birds adopted temporarily after the breeding season.

3. Obscurity, decline, downfall.


Video / audio / text : Ian Gibbins

Artificial face generation : Generated Media, Inc

3D head model : ZStuff, Sketchfab.com

Concept inspired by : WOW Inc "Inori-Prayer-"

Video animation adapted from a sequence made for "UGLY - a NOT Fairytale", Adelaide Fringe Festival 2022.

Text based on "eclipse midsummer" by Ian Gibbins, published in otoliths 38 (2015).


www.iangibbins.com.au

vimeo.com/iangibbins


Further AI resources for Video


mRotoAI - A Final Cut Pro plug-in that does some AI-type masking and rotoscoping:

https://www.motionvfx.com/


A really amazing algorithmic object / image generator is Particle Illusion. And it’s free!! It’s made by Boris FX who make all kinds of good plug-ins for video editing.

https://borisfx.com/products/particle-illusion/


The AI generated faces, made from a library of images of paid actors come from Generated Photos. To get the best out this, you need to pay a modest amount:

https://generated.photos/


Runaway - image based AI for stills and video: https://runwayml.com/


MidJourney - this is the diffusion model AI I have used for generating images from text. The other two that are widely used are DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. To use MidJourney, you need to sign up for the Discord server they use. Once there, it’s easy, especially if you are willing to pay a small amount for a private interface. This link explains some of this: https://docs.midjourney.com/

[Ian used an early version of MidJourney to create the source images for an animated background is The Bilgestruck. Some of the water in this video is composited and animated from real footage, some of it was generated algorithmically. It was originally developed for a gallery installation but this version is different, mostly in the way the sound works. The language is almost entirely made up (by Ian, not AI!):


Shipwreck/barrage generation: MidJourney AI

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©2024 by Helen Dewbery.
 

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