I have been working on training and producing the outputs of the gas mask training model for many years. It started in 2020 when I entered a South Korean AI art contest. The prompt was for something about “Faces”
My concept involved gas masks and clocks mixed together. These are two things with faces. I wanted to play with something that looked apocalyptic and had a concept of time. I gathered a few thousand images of found gas mask images and images of clocks.
![Gas Mask Artistic Styling](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/109147864_056204355-1-studio.jpg)
![Military Gas Mask](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/116249632_2601516883497785_4375330836564442458_n.jpg)
![Mickey Mouse Gas Mask](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/3151379661_f5dbbdc259.jpg)
![Historical Gas Mask on dark hooded man](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/b6bf037b1b9eb280cd7ce22af1aae74d.jpg)
![WW1 gas mask on child](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ee97d902a8d07178322dbbc194503daf.jpg)
![Bahnhofsuhr Zuerich Clock](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/250px-BahnhofsuhrZuerich_RZ.jpg)
![Big Ben Clock Face](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Big_Ben_Clock_Face.jpg)
![large clock with zodiac](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/383419e7dd214b731c72a8625451479c.jpg)
![a melting clock by Dali](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/e2ba16cb36f013813b21f4dc0e0ea370.jpg)
But I also added some of my own images some of which I drew on dada.art some on paper with pen and then others with an oscilloscope by creating SVG files from hand drawn images.
![Pen Drawing Gas mask by Bard Ionson](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_9136.jpg)
![Pen Drawing Gas mask with clock as ventilation hole by Bard Ionson](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_9137.jpg)
![Pen Drawing Gas mask by Bard Ionson](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/IMG_9135.jpg)
![gas mask oscilloscope drawing green](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/gasmask1bluegreen.jpg)
![gas mask oscilloscope blue violet](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/gasmask1bluepurvio.jpg)
![gasmask oscilloscope violet white](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/gasmask1violetwhite.jpg)
![Gas Mask Man by Bard Ionson with green hat](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/preview_foo20200807-20240-10gkm1h.jpg)
![person in Gas Mask Umbrella hand drawn on dada.art](https://bardionson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/preview_foo20200808-25237-1lzschk.jpg)
Many thousands of curated images were used to train a SyleGAN 2 model on top of an existing public face model. The model takes a 2 to 8 hours to train itself.
When finished I looked through many thousands of images it generated to select interesting ones and used video generation software int Google Colab and Runway ML to create a latent walkthrough. This is where the software is used to move inside the matrix of the model through the placements of the pixels and colors and shapes to produce a morphing video.
These videos were enlarged and composted together for the AI art show. The art did not win the competition but in December 2021 it was selected for a special art exhibition in Paris with the Museum of Crypto Art called Crypto Art Revolution.
Here more about this on ArtBoxDMV soon.