Video | Counting of Days
Machine visions of the world from above
at a time when flying was not an option
Making of
The project of visualizing the concept of Johanna's TERRA album took place at the midst of the pandemic. This created limitations to the possibilities to gathering the materials for the video, but also an opportunity.
The abundance of open satellite image data combined with generative image processing AI models presented unique opportunities for representing the world in ways that we haven't experienced before. For Counting of Days, I combined GAN models trained with Sentinel-2 data from two datasets that I had collected: One with about 7000 high-resolution RGB and DEM images from remote African deserts, and one with aerials photos of cities and urban areas in the US and in Asia.
StyleGAN2 progression when training on Sentinel2 data from remote desert satellite footage. As a fun observation, note that at one point, the AI learns to present shadows of clouds but forgets the clouds!
Urban training data → AI model → Particle simulation and rendering