Liminal Scape, an Interactive Visual Installation with Expressive AI

Liminal Scape is a visual art installation with an expressive AI system that has been trained to recognize human emotion and generate abstract images at will. The proposed system receives an image (photographic portrait) and labels it based on the recognized emotional valence. Our system takes this initial photo and paints it red, yellow, or blue depending on the recognized emotions (from the facial expression) using a painterly algorithm which in turn becomes an input for a two modified Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models known as Deep Dream and Neural Style. These systems along with a final particle system pass generate a range of latent images that convey the initial emotion, unique to the given input (photographic portrait) and the labeled category (R, Y or B). Our system combines emergent and arbitrary behavior and breeding aspects of CNNs (in the low level) with a hybrid ML/particle stroking system to explore art creation within a high complexity space of artificial creativity.