_Animation in X-Reality_ was a summer school on the expanded field of animation: motion capture, projection mapping, sound production and creative artificial intelligence. Different practical workshops by the participating universities were held on these topics and participants also enjoyed field trips and cultural activities.
The project was a collaboration of four different universities: the Department of Graphical Systems at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University as hosting university in collaboration with KISD, Tampere University of Applied Sciences and Academy of Media Arts Cologne. KISD contributed a workshop on collaborating with and appropriating artificial intelligence for filmmaking. A novel TTI text-to-image approach was applied in conjunction with a myriad of other techniques that are based on Neural architectures e.g. upscaling and frame interpolation. Image synthetization processes with state of the art machine learning models were combined with traditional creative techniques such as animation, sketching and photography resulting in an experimenal human-machine co-creation. The workshop included working with Python commands, Jupyter Notebooks, as well as command-line based interfaces and let to familiarization of the students with the JupyterLab and Anaconda ecosystems.
It also included a reflection on the training data the models used in the workshop were trained with and discussions about possible societal impacts ensued. Aim of the workshop was to convey a basic understanding on the use of command line interfaces as well as an intuition about how large scale machine learning networks can contribute to the workflow of designers and artists. The workshop was conducted by Lisa Marleen Mantel and Laura Wagner and organized in collaboration with the research project KITeGG on design and AI. The host university provided a workshop on music production with composer Marius Salynas and a workshop showing different motion capturing techniques: optical motion capture and Tania de León Yong from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne held a workshop on projection mapping practice and the software resolume. The cultural activities included a trip to the Palace of Grand Dukes of Lithuania, a visit to a contemporary dance performance and a trip to the historic stronghold of Trakai as well as a city tour in Vilnius together with the students from the host university.
Outcome of the project was a projection mapping presentation on a model of the Vilnius City Hall building. In the follow-up participants are now invited to refine their artwork in order to qualify for projection on the city hall building during the light festival and the cities 700 year anniversary in January 2022.
KISD faculty
Lisa Marleen Mantel
Laura Wagner
Prof. Dr. Lasse Scherffig
Participants
Maxim Diehl
Alex Koch
Johannes Growe
Joshua Probst
Bessie Normand
Samia Rachid
Bea Timmermann
Duration
May 23-June 4, 2022
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania
Project Partners
Vilnius Gediminas Technical University
Tampere University of Applied Sciences
Academy of Media Arts Cologne
BMBF-Project KITeGG: Making AI Tangible And Comprehensible: Connecting Technology And Society Through Design
