Following a successful participation at the Vilnius Light Festival in 2023, KISD once again participated in the international summer school on “Expanded Animations” in Vilnius, Lithuania. At the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Lithuanian Song Festival, students created audiovisual works in international teams and presented them in the Visitor Center of the Lithuanian Parliament in Vilnius.
Hosted by the Department of Graphical Systems at Vilnius Technical University, KISD collaborated with the University of Porto, Riga Technical University, University of Greifswald, and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne on the topic of the expanded field of animation. New animation technologies such as 3D reconstruction, generative graphics and generative ‘artificial intelligence’ were applied to create a series of video works and explore new perspectives on the cultural heritage of the Song Festival “Dainų šventė”, recognized by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage.
The project’s focus was on engaging with the century-old tradition of Lithuanian song celebration. As a starting point, traditional Lithuanian songs were selected and recorded by Vilnius Tech’s own choir, “Gabija.” These songs formed the base-material for the students’ audio-visual works, with each group choosing one song from the provided catalog as the basis for their project.
The project was initiated with a virtual project phase in which the student teams were able to get to know each other, familiarize themselves with the selected song and the cultural context behind it, and work remotely on developing concepts and narratives.
Afterwards, students and faculty from all participating universities met in Vilnius for a one-week production phase to finalise the projects. During this week, the students were also introduced to new technical possibilities for the production of audiovisual works, which supported the expanded and experimental approach to animation in their projects.
KISD contributed a workshop on generative artificial intelligence, supported by the research project KITeGG, where students were guided to generate synthetic video sequences using the open source deforum extension using the Automatic1111 web interface for Stable Diffusion.
The resulting works featured different perspectives on the engagement with cultural tradition and novel technologies. Themes and creative concepts ranged from accessing and editing historical material provided by the Lithuanian Radio and Television Archives (LRT), mixing real live footage with 3D reconstructions and modelled 3D worlds, producing original songs based on the given traditional one, to utilizing artificial intelligence for both visuals and sound.
The final projects were exhibited as a screening in the Seimas Visitors’ Centre of the Lithuanian Parliament as part of the official accompanying program of the festival from 28 June to 6 July 2024.
Supported by Erasmus+, Vilnius Tech choir “Gabija”, LNKC (Lithuanian National Centre for Culture), Seimas Visitors Centre, LRT (Lithuanian Radio and Television Archives) & KITeGG
