Celebrating the centennial anniversary of the LA Philharmonic, Mital designed and built multiple AI and machine learning algorithms that were used to analyze and present a century of archival data – over 45 terabytes of information – in various forms including generative images and bespoke video artworks. The work is both a look at the past 100 years of the LA Phil’s musical history and an imagination of what the next 100 years could look like, culminating in a public art symphony projected onto the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The artwork addresses the question: “when we dream, our minds process memories to form new combinations of images and ideas. Can a concert hall do the same?”
For more than three months, Mital together with members of Refik Anadol Studio dove into the archives generated from four different homes of the LA Philharmonic, collecting and structuring massive amounts of data. From there, Mital developed multiple custom neural network models with the ability to re-structure and organize the corpus of image, video, and audio media- a spectacularly difficult challenge when working with tens of terabytes.
The models were ultimately able to categorize information, isolate structured segments of audio, and identify similarities within segments.
Ultimately, the performance leverages the Walt Disney Concert Hall to present three unique chapters of “dreams” from the multiple neural network models Mital designed.
The first chapter, “Centennial Memories,” uses convolutional neural network models (CNN) to generate metadata and create infographic representations of the archives.
The second chapter of the performance features speculative images created using generative adversarial networks (GAN) trained on archival images from the previous century of data. The GAN algorithms create bespoke, generative videos as well as sounds.
The final portion of the film, “Dream,” leverages character-level text-prediction neural-network models trained on Frank Ghery’s original CAD drawings of the Concert Hall to imagine new architectural drawings.
Additionally, Mital built custom audio synthesis and browsing techniques that were used to generate the final 12 minute long composition that played during the projected symphony. In collaboration with sound designers Kerim Karaoglu and Robert Thomas, the archival audio “was divided into nearly 10 million segments and each was then characterized by 256 attributes such as pitch, timbre, amplitude, tempo, tonality, and key. These attributes were then projected into a 6 dimensional space and represented as a 3D plane with space (x, y, z) + color (r, g, b) mapped to the 6-dimensions.”
The outcome of a fruitful collaboration between Mital, Refik Anadol, and many other talented collaborators (listed below), the performance represented a novel look at the synthesis of the past and the future, brilliantly projected for the public on the canvas of an iconic Los Angeles institution.
Collaborators:
Refik Anadol Studio: Carrie H, Christina Moushou, Efsun Erkilic, Kian Khiaban, Ho Man Leung, Nicholas Boss, Nate Mohler, Raman Mustafa, Refik Anadol, Toby Heinemann
David Gann, Kenric McDowell, Kerim Karaoglu, Eva Kozanecka, Kyle McLean, Robert Thomas, Ross Goodwin, schnellebuntebilder, Sebastian Neitsch, Simon Weckert, Andrew Piepenbrink, Nathan Turczan, Adam Roberts, Dan Ellis
Additional Links:
WDCH Dreams Premiered at ECCV 2018 here
WDCH Dreams featured in New York Times article
WDCH Dreams presented by Google Arts & Culture article