Director and media artist Vadim Epstein: “Ghosts is the most complete and extended opus from the ongoing series, exploring complexity emergence, based on feedback loops.

“Multidomain image-to-image transforming neural network StarGAN2 has been used here recurrently, reprocessing its own output without additional inputs. The models have been trained on both figurative imagery and abstract art, to enrich and intensify the visual and semantic experience.

“Moreover, part of the training data was synthetic itself: a few source datasets were generated with custom StyleGAN2 models, adding another layer of mediation to distance even farther from the real.

“What we eventually get is an ever-changing shape-shifting loosely controlled abstract flux, which appears more lifelike and expressive on its own, than an obscure resemblance of the origin flesh, stuck in neural convolutions.”
 

 
Director/animator: Vadim Epstein

Sound design: Alexander Kopeikin, Fractal Heads

Source code: github.com/eps696/stargan2