Hannu Töyrylä

First you take the wrong turn (2024)

Part of my recent work on AI art: city views which keep gradually changing into something else, a part of the view at a time, constantly challenging how the spectator perceives the view.

What is it I am doing here? Curating my own photo library as well as taking more photos to add to it. Devising ways of mixing images in a semi random manner so that nothing stays what it appears to be.

I make use of  U-net models for damaging and restoring images, neural style and some diffusion to make semi abstract versions of the views, feature matching and depth maps for selecting which part of the canvas will change next and which image will be partially embedded into it next.

Lots of experimentation and custom code. Adjustable skip connections in the U-net to fine-tune the visual effect, also more traditional image processing like bilateral filtering, histogram equalization and unsharp mask. And then some simple tricks of my own.

And even more experimenting with the process to fine-tune the resulting aesthetics.