ALL PROJECTS / 2019

Poem Portraits: Original Experiment

Year: 2019

Client: Es Devlin Studio / Google Arts & Culture, London, UK

Technology: Node.js, Torch language model, Google Cloud GPU autoscaling, face pose estimation, GLSL shaders, three.js

Reference Links

Video file

External Links

"Poem Portraits" on Experiments with Google "Poem Portraits" on Google Arts & Culture "Poem Portraits" on Es Devlin "Co-write some poetry with Google AI" by Marie Boran for The Irish Times

Description

Original Google Arts & Culture experiment with Es Devlin and Ross Goodwin, combining participant selfies with AI-generated two-line poems trained on 19th-century poetry.

Participants donated a single word; the system generated a new line of poetry, mapped it onto their face in the browser, and added the contribution to an evolving collective poem. IYOIYO supported the web, face, graphics, and infrastructure work that made the piece responsive at public scale.