For his latest experiment merging music and visuals, producer/musician/artist Max Cooper teams with Belgian machine learning researcher and digital artist Xander Steenbrugge to turn the words of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein into a spellbinding stream of motion art.

Xander Steenbrugge: “From the very start of this collaboration, Max and I were very eager to leverage the latest advances in AI to directly visualize language through the mind of the machine.

“I’ve been exploring this approach using a combination of two machine learning models: a generative system called VQGAN, which can generate pixels starting from a blank canvas, and a perceptual system called CLIP that guides this generator by scoring how well the generated imagery matches a given language prompt.

“Through this feedback loop, the system can be used to directly convert language into the visual domain.

“After an early phase of experimentation with this technique, we settled on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as the narrative as it deals directly with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define the limits of science.

“This final video then is a direct visualization of many of the statements posed by Wittgenstein in his seminal work, as interpreted by the AI.”
 

 
Label: Mesh
Music: Max Cooper

Production: Mesh Films
Director: Xander Streenbrugge