Deeply Artificial Trees

This work uses the deep learning techniques of "deep dream" and "wavenet" to reprocess footage of Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting — a glimpse of what it might be like for an artificial intelligence to watch, and hallucinate over, a television painting lesson.

A WaveNet audio model was trained on a season of the program's audio to generate a wordless, voice-like soundtrack, while the video was passed through Google DeepDream and VGG image-recognition models, so that the painter's brushstrokes dissolve into animals and other forms. The audio approach grew out of Reben's Deep Tongues (2017), in which a deep-learning model trained on hundreds of speakers was embedded in a realistic sculpture of a mouth.