Project 2: Art!

Introduction
As evident in the above images, my piece went through some dramatic changes as I altered my model settings. I began with images of geometric tessellations, which I attempted to hybridize with images of graphic representations of neural networks and found little success (in simple terms, my art was very ugly). After playing around with the saturation, colors, and other elements of my images, I realized that darker images and ones of significatly different sizes, were not very compatable and ajusted accordingly.



Inspiration
On a more personal note, William and Mary and the Jump Start program are both very important to me, which I sought to convey in my piece. One of the trademarks of the College is the Wren building. At a ripe ~320 years old, the Wren building has weathered it all, give or take a few fires, standing the test of time day after day. Similarly, students of the Jump Start program have powered through the program, standing an analogous test of time. The Wren building not only serves as a symbol of triumph and determination but also as a reminder of the importance of community. Celebrations such as Eule log, Wren 10s, and Convocation all revolve around community and appropiatly take place at Wren. The overwhelming sense of community accrued though this program, after persisting through the challenges presented by the pandemic and rallying when feeling defeated, is reflected through the symbolism of Wren and its numberous beloved traditions.
The second image I used to create this piece was an image of a circuit board. The board’s wires run in every direction but all converge at some point or another. This is representative of students’ paths to the Jump Start program. We have come from different backgrounds, majors, and even countries but came together together for this. We are an imperfect group that sometimes crashes all together but have remained a united team through every twist and turn of this circiut board. The circuit board is the foundation of every computer and, similarly, the Jump Start program is the foundation of our data science careers. No matter where we go next, we will still be tethered to these points of unity that were undoubtably cemented in out lives this summer.

My Design
Below are two possibilities of how my art could be displayed on a shirt. Across the top of my art, I wrote “Jump Start Data Science 2020” (which can be changed). I wrote this in the same font that is used in PyCharm and Jupyter Notebook in reference to the many hours we spend on either platform. I also rounded the edges of the image for a more clean finish.





The Process
As I mentioned above, my artwork went through many renditions before I arrived at the selected piece. After settling on base images, I made changes by switching the style and content paths to balance out some of the coloration issues I had. I also changed the number of epochs and the steps per epoch to change the over pronunciation of either image.
My initial ‘stylized image’ that the program produced was simply a blue version of wren. I liked the abstractness of the image and later decided to run this image with the circuit board, which ended up producing my final piece.

One of my other favorite outputs was created when I ran the image of wren with the circuit board with just 1 epoch and 10 steps. It looks like the image was painted.


DeepDream
I also had the chance to play around with the DeepDream implementation of this program. After performing this on my above art, I didn’t like the results so I decided to try it with an image of one of my own plants. Below is an image of my plant (a sanseveria or snake plant) before and after applying DeepDream.



DCGAN
I attempted this and it is still running (it has been over 3 hours) so I will add it when it finishes. I used the keras plant_leaves dataset instead of the mnist ones we’ve used in the past and so far, so good!