Latent Field #35

Generated invitation cards for the Berthold Leibinger Stiftung's award giving ceremony 2023 and interactive installation. A plane in Stable Diffusion's latent space was found and sampled to create 1008 unique invitation cards. Upon entering the event, visitors cards are scanned and the invitation card of the previous guest morphs into theirs.

While I was employed by the ZKM, the Berthold-Leibinger-Stiftung requested an AI generated artwork for the invitation cards of their biennial award giving ceremony. As the award is given to innovations in the field of laser applications, I wanted to create invitation cards that reflect a fundamental property of light to unite all awardees - the duality of photons. That is, light may be either represented as particles or as waves. Both representations are valid and can be used to describe the behavior of light in different contexts. However, the two representations are mutually exclusive and cannot be observed simultaneously. In a playful attempt to visualize a solution to the paradox, I forced Stable Diffusion to smoothly transition between images of photons as particles and images of photons as waves.
While I focused on a cohesive narrative through image generation, Bernd Lintermann supervised the overall project and Yasha Jain implemented the interactive installation.

Image Generation

Stable Diffusion basically has two inputs: a text prompt and a latent vector (noise). Text prompts are transformed into a fixed size text embedding before being fed into the model. With fixed sized vector we can perform arithmetic operations such as addition or interpolation. This allows us to create smooth transitions between two text prompts, resulting in an image that blends the characteristics of both prompts. On the other hand, the noise vector can be viewed as the structural seed for the generated images. When interpolating between two noise vectors, the resulting images tend to exhibit a smooth transition in terms of their overall structure and composition, but not necessarily in terms of their semantic content.
Earlier that year I experimented with navigating Stable Diffusion latent space for an exhibition where visitors literally walk in the latent space. For that I created a two dimensional plane in the latent space of Stable Diffusion by interpolating between the different vectors pairs. One axis of the plane interpolates the appearance while the other axis controls the semantic content of the generated images (wave vs. particle). The tricky part now was to find combinations that would look good together and then check if the interpolation does as well. Finally, one field was sampled as a grid of 28 x 36 images to create 1008 unique invitation cards.

Interactive Installation

The invitation cards were not only used as physical invitations but also as part of an interactive installation at the award giving ceremony. Upon entering the event, visitors scanned their cards at a terminal. The installation then displayed a morphing animation on a large screen, where the invitation card of the previous guest smoothly transformed into that of the current guest. This created a dynamic and engaging experience, highlighting the uniqueness of each invitation while also emphasizing their connection through the shared latent space.