Daniel Ambrosi

2020 / Computational Photography, Artificial Intelligence

For Daniel Ambrosi, computational photography is about more than just creating a sense of place. It’s about conveying how we feel about the environment—viscerally, cognitively, and emotionally.

The Process

gtc20-ai-art-gallery-overview-daniel-ambrosi-process-1a-3c33-D

Developing the "full scene" AI-augmented artwork started with capturing 45 photos from a single location, which were then stitched (Autopano Pro) and blended (Aurora HDR Pro) into a giant (482+ megapixel) panorama and cropped and sweetened in Photoshop. It was processed with a proprietary version of Google DeepDream running on NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs.

gtc20-ai-art-gallery-daniel-ambrosi-process-1b-3c33-D

Finally, Daniel experimented with tools and techniques (including effects available in Filter Forge) to further explore the graphic possibilities inherent in his “Dreamscapes.” His most recent attempts have led to a series he calls Infinite Dreams, an exploration of Cubism-inspired "refracted" dreaming.

gtc20-ai-art-gallery-overview-daniel-ambrosi-process-1c-3c33-D

In this video, Dreamscapes: The Tech Behind the Art, engineers Joseph Smarr (Google) and Chris Lamb (NVIDIA) offer a layman's explanation on how they modified Google's open-source DeepDream software to operate on multi-hundred megapixel images. See how this innovative process enabled computational photography artist Daniel Ambrosi to take his work to new heights.

The Experience

gtc20-ai-art-gallery-overview-daniel-ambrosi-experience-1ccw-D

This scene was captured in October 2018 during rush hour from a window on the 16th floor of an office building near Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan. The artist created this Dreamscape in March 2020 during the coronavirus crisis, when a bustling scene like this started to feel like a distant dream. It fuses computational photography and artificial intelligence to create an environment that’s fascinating to explore.

EXPLORE

Daniel Ambrosi

Daniel Ambrosi is one of the founding creators of the emerging AI art movement and is noted for the nuanced balance he achieves in human-AI hybrid art. He has been exploring novel methods of visual presentation for almost 40 years since Cornell University, where he earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree and a Masters in 3D Graphics. In 2011, Daniel devised a unique form of computational photography that generates exceptionally immersive landscape images. More recently, his "Dreamscapes" add a powerful new graphics tool: a computer vision program to visualize the inner workings of deep learning artificial intelligence models.

www.dreamscapes.ai
Twitter

Sessions at GTC