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Behind the Screens
Altered Frames of Mind: An AI Augmented Visual Poem Diary, is a collection of visual poem videos that chronicle a month-long personal and artistic journey of an independent creative technologist at the onset of the generative AI revolution. Each entry reflects my daily emotional state through the lens of the nascent and rapidly transforming AI art landscape during the spring of 2023, exploring what it means for art, creativity, and my own mental stability.
Each day for an entire month, starting with a poetry prompt by Joseph Fasano, I composed a new poem and created an accompanying video using new tools that were emerging daily. Giving myself a 30-minute limit to complete each entry, I experimented with over 40 new AI art, audio, and video tools, alongside traditional filmmaking, animation, and illustration techniques, and produced the 31 Visual Poem Videos that comprise this project.
Using image generators such as Midjourney and Leonardo AI, I was able to quickly iterate upon my own illustrations or create entirely new visuals. With video and animation tools such as Genmo, Neural Frames, and RunwayML, I brought these images to life with dynamic motion and transformation. Audio synthesis apps like 11 Labs and Altered AI transformed my voice recordings, enabling me to experiment with different genders, ages, and characters. Music generators such as AIVA and Google’s Test Kitchen produced original compositions to match the mood and tone of each piece.
Since completing this project, there have been massive leaps in the generative AI space, especially in text-to-video and text-to-3D. These impressive new tools still have limitations, and their power, like the tools I used in this project, lies in artists’ abilities to develop new workflows and techniques that stack these tools together along with traditional methods to express multi-sensorial stories with a speed and immediacy that was largely unthinkable less than two years ago.
Ultimately, this project is an eclectic and often absurdist ledger of my mercurial mental health, a snapshot of the early stages of generative art, and a proof of concept of AI as a collaborative tool that amplifies, rather than replaces, human creativity and emotional expression.
Tools Used
VISUALS • Leonardo Al • Midjourney • Stable Diffusion • DALL-E 2 • Starry Al • Runway ML • Genmo • Neural Frames • Kaiber • Decoherence • Artflow • Typpo • LeiaPix • Wonder Dynamics • Plasmapunk • Playphrase • Skybox Al • Vatic • Call Annie • Suno • Adobe Firefly
SOUND • 11 Labs • Altered Al • Uberduck • Coqui • Metavoice • AIVA • Databass • Boomy • Beatbot • Google MusicLM • PlayHT • Suno • Trackly
About The Artist
Lorne Svarc is a writer and creative technologist based in Montreal and New York City. His work spans theatre, film, and interactive storytelling. He is the founder of Technodramatists and a pioneer in the field of augmented reality theatre and live experiences. Lorne's mission is to create tools, processes, and spaces that blend traditional practices with emerging technologies, empowering artists of all kinds to realize their creative visions. Above all, Lorne believes that every part of the art creation process, from blank slate to finished project, and finally to the eyes, ears, and hopefully, hearts audiences, should be an experience filled with joy, wonder, and at least a little bit of meaning.
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