CROSSLUCID met Sarolli and Quaranta in 2019 while working on a project with the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa, Italy. “We had many fruitful conversations with them about the potentialities of AI, specifically GANs, and shared similar goals in terms of exploring this field,” recalls Toth. For the new portrait series, CROSSLUCID employed datasets originating from Landscapes Between Eternities. They processed these through artificial neural networks, which are the computing systems fundamental to deep learning algorithms, which, as the name suggests, are inspired by models of the human brain. GANs, specifically, are a type of AI model that uses two neural networks, which compete with each other, to generate output.
“Normally, you need a big dataset, like a minimum of 10,000 images, to feed GANs so they can look for patterns and learn from them,” explains Zybura. “Of course, we didn’t have that. We initially had an extremely small dataset of 100 published images from the photobook. So we thought, ‘What would happen if we used test shots from our movement and texture studies as input?’ That’s when we decided to add around 200 images to the dataset that didn’t make it into the book or were error shots. From an artistic perspective, it was interesting to reveal so much of our creative process and include these behind-the-scenes images, but, for the GANs to be trained properly, it was also necessary.”