Idea #1: BeanKrypt

Capture Subject: Experimental Event/Still Life
Capture Technique: Steganography
Platform for Release: Python Web-App

BeanKrypt would be a web-app where you can type a message and the app would then encode that message into a random image of beans (steganography). It would then prompt you to download the encoded image. You could send that image to someone, and they would then upload the image to the website, and it would decode to the original message.

Inspiration: Kardashian Krypt

Idea #2: This Seb Does Not Exist

Capture Subject: Experimental Portrait
Capture Technique: Machine Learning
Platform for Release: Python (Maybe JS) Web-App

Using a model I generated a while ago using RunwayML, I would make a web-app that generates a new image on each visit to the page. Sort of a spoof of all those this___doesnotexist.com websites, but with my face.

Inspiration: this-person-does-not-exist.com

Idea #3: Agent Art

Capture Subject: Experimental Landscape
Capture Technique: 2d Animated Generative Art
Platform for Release: p5.js Sketch

I thought it could be cool to try and create generative art made by ‘agents’ (sorta like artistic little ants). An agent would have simple behavior, like ‘go forward’, ‘have child’, ‘change color’. And by having lots of these agents doing things with a bit of randomness, they would generate art!

Inspiration: Generative Subreddit Post

The Plan

I’m going to go with idea 1 – BeanKrypt. I thought about combining ideas 1 and 2, but the RunwayML endpoint is in JS, and I want to create my web-app in python using flask and heroku. I also thought about trying to host the GAN model myself, but it needs to run on a GPU. If I want to deploy to web, then this could be costly/take some time.

W 4/27: Scrape images of beans from the web

Weekend 4/29: Catch up on work for other classes 😦

M 5/2: Rough flask prototype

W 5/4: Polish flask prototype

Weekend 5/6: Deploy to web

Next monday I expect to have a roughly working flask prototype