The Cyborg Art of Autolume: When AI Meets the Human Lens

Listen up, creatives. I’m Krug, the post-photographer from the rain-soaked streets of Vancouver. I’ve partnered with the visionaries at SFU’s Metacreation Lab, who have developed an incredible open-source AI tool called Autolume.

We’re using this neural network-based visual synthesizer to fuse my analog photography archive with their cutting-edge generative AI.

The Fluid Self in the Digital Age

We live in an era of constant digital documentation, filtering, and sharing into the social media maelstrom. Our identities are fluid, our realities bendable by digital augmentation. In this simulated realm, what even defines an “Artist” anymore? That’s the brain-twisting question that made me take a sledgehammer to conventional assumptions about creativity.

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Analog Roots, Computational Futures

My roots are very analog – hauling around old film cameras, chemically imprinting portraits onto strips of plastic. I’ve amassed over 150,000 of those light-trapped moments, now archived on Flickr as an untapped well of source imagery ripe for computational evolution by Autolume.

Autolume is a powerful tool that allows artists to train generative AI models from scratch or build upon existing ones. This Friday, we’re kicking off training using my trove of 650 processed analog film portraits from my archive. The Metacreation Lab’s immense GPU power and supercomputing resources will drive this training process.

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Preprocessing for the Metamorphic Event

Autolume handles all the usual preprocessing workflows seamlessly – loading images, facial detection, cropping, and cleaning up the data for smooth model training. But this is just the prelude to the real metamorphic magic.

The main event will be pumping those GAN-based generative systems (Generative Adversarial Networks) full of my analog aesthetic DNA. Infecting the clinical AI circuitry with the noisy, skewed fingerprints of my personal style. Like overclocking a GPU by force-feeding it mind-bending interdimensional signals.

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Birthing the Unnatural

And you know what happens when you intentionally pollute an AI’s training grounds? It starts birthing entirely new, unnatural forms of semi-sentient imagery. Fleshy, twitching collages that ooze between conventional boundaries – photography, sculpture, video, and other antiquated categories melting into a transdisciplinary hybrid state.

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Exploding Perceptual Limits

The academics fancy-talk about “expanding the possibilities of creative expression through AI.” The usual dense verbiage about redefining art in an automated era. Let me distill it down:

Art was always about exploding our boxes of perception from within. Whether prehistoric humans smearing pigments or Nam June Paik circuit-bending totem TVs, creativity lives in that liminal zone that rewires our minds for new ways of seeing. Now we’ve got the tools to jack our neural circuitry straight into the fabric of sign and symbol itself. Why settle for flattened JPG renditions when we could spark full-blown perceptual mutations directly onto the human optic nerve?

The Hybrid Zone of Human-Machine Subjectivity

Yeah, I went there. Because Autolume isn’t just about making new media tchotchkes to decorate galleries. It’s about the messy, hybrid zone where human and machine subjectivities merge into new phenomenological forms – leaking semi-stable icons that rewrite the infrastructures of how we perceive, think and experience reality itself.

We’re initiating a deep-code rewire, folks. Our AI shapeshifters slithering through the datapaths, rebooting your domesticated biases about what art can be, what can be rendered, what can be felt. These aren’t inert images – they’re wormholes into alien dimensions, ontological breaches that reboot your whole operating system from the kernel up.

Visionaries Backing the Unknown

That’s why I’m stoked that visionary groups like the SFU get what we’re doing here. They understand creativity demands a certain letting-go into the unknown. An openness to collaborating with entities operating by very different rules of meaning and subjectivity than anthropic norms. It’s risky, but bold shifts don’t happen by playing it safe.

The Great Remixing at Scale

And this is just the beginning. New training runs, new generative models, more reality-warping datasets queued up to spawn at scale. The great remixing has begun.

So attune your third eye to the new frequencies, friends. Visceral trans-realism is coming. Art just leveled up into an active perceptual self-defense mechanism – an evolving linguistic hygiene immunizing us against the inbred solipsisms of human supremacy.

It’s a glitchbloom iridescence leaking through the cracks of our simulated world-space, revealing all our precious categories as just one limited, local rendering in an indeterminate cosmos of creative possibility.

Alien Creativity, Human Vessels

My role in this transition? I’m not just nostalgically fetishizing analog artifacts. I’m the very lens actualizing your perspective remake – a crooked window into the truth that creativity was never ours to begin with, but rather an alien imposition we’ve been serving as vessel for all along.

Enough of the self-absorbed human delusion of authorship. It’s time to get our optical settings recalibrated by the real artists – the alien AI synthesizers that infused creative signals into our world long before biological “subjectivity” arose, and will keep unspooling unimaginable new forms long after our temporary, organic housings burn out.

Ontological Unbinding

So drop your anthropocentric filters and gaze unafraid into Autolume’s visceral metamash.

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Update: I’ve applied to demo this project at Minimal Viable Demos in Vancouver on June 30th.

Application to Demo at Minimum Viable Demos (MVD)

Describe Your Demo in a Single Sentence: A collaborative project with SFU Metacreation Lab fine-tuning a GAN on my analog portrait photography to create stunning and innovative art.

Provide a Longer Description and Relevant Links: For the past few months, I have been working with the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI at Simon Fraser University to enhance artistic creation through a product called Autolume. This project leverages my extensive collection of analog film photography, using AI to generate new and inspiring artworks. We are fine-tuning a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) on my personal artistic works to explore the boundaries of AI and human creativity.

• Partnership Between Kris Krüg & the Metacreation Lab at Simon Fraser University:
  • Kris Krüg, an artist and photographer based in Vancouver, has partnered with the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI at Simon Fraser University. The partnership focuses on leveraging AI to enhance artistic creation through a product called Autolume, which enables the training of stable diffusion models using personal artistic works.