The Miami Children’s Museum approached us to create an interactive installation for their new exhibit All About Art. The exhibit focuses on teaching children about the elements of art, like color, form, line, shape, space, and texture, as well as expose visitors to broad movements and styles of art. Our team’s experience as artists ourselves informed the project we pitched and made us perfect candidates to win the work. We were tasked with creating an installation that was engaging and educational that offered the kids a chance to create artworks of their own.
We wanted to create an experience that played to the strengths of children’s artistic tendencies. Finger painting is often the first artistic experience that children find themselves participating in, so we designed an installation that turns their simple doodles into detailed works of art in the style of famous painters and modern artists. The exhibit features two screens, the first is a large tabletop touchscreen where multiple children can draw together at the same time, collaborating to create an artwork. The second screen lies embedded in a gold frame propped up against an easel. The children can choose between three or four colors by touching the table with multiple fingers. One finger might be blue, two fingers green, three fingers brown, and so on. As the children draw on the tabletop, their simple doodle gets transformed into a work of fine art on the framed screen. Areas that children painted green may appear as grass on the finished screen, blue may become sky, and brown may become ground.
To create this installation, we drew from the machine learning experience that our research and development lab has been gathering for the past year. The image transformation techniques we used have only been in development since 2016, and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first interactive art installation to use them.
In addition to this work, we also created another installation in the same exhibit.
Branger_Briz would like to thank Alex J. Champandard and Dmitry Ulyanov for their open research in the domain of semantic style transfer.