March 11, 2021
I wrote a poem titled 'Creation', trying to capture 1 kind of creative process- eloquently put by Michelangelo as 'every stone block has a statue inside it and its upto the sculptor to set it free'. The poem I wrote is about a block of wood lying around, unattended to and gathering dust. One fine day a sculpture emerges from it- an artist saw that piece of wood and brought out the sculpture hidden in it. In my practice working with GANs, i feel there's a strong resemblance to creating art from the massive dump of the latent space. Putting all of this together, I use the BigGAN latent space to tell the story of the poem I wrote, searching through the latent space for appropriate visuals for each line of text, and interpolating between various frames to create the final video output. Finally paraphrasing Emily Dickinson's beautiful words, GANs try and replicate the truth of the dataset, but end up doing it in a 'slant' manner. Twitter- @harshitrnnh