Jeffrey Berg, the artist and technologist who became famous as the Metaverse artist known as "AM Radio" -- a Second Life avatar who created profoundly surreal and poignant immersive installations like "The Faraway" -- has lately been experimenting with integrating his work with gen AI platforms. Watch above, where one of his paintings (reminiscent of The Faraway) is transformed into a dreamy Terence Malick-esque movie scene.
"Using Runway ML is actually straightforward," he tells me, explaining the platform/technical process and artistic approach. "You start by uploading an image and describing what you want to see happen in the video. Then you wait to see how the output aligns with your vision. Personally, I’d estimate my success rate is about 25%. I define success as the output effectively conveying the emotion or sensation I’m trying to communicate.
"To make the process more efficient, I take notes on the wording and syntax that lead to favorable results for my specific goals. I’m mindful of the carbon footprint of this technology, so I prioritize producing meaningful, impactful results. If the outputs don’t show promise quickly, I end the session and reconsider the prompts or the source image. It’s easy to approach the tool like a hammer and just keep hitting anything and everything, relying on it to generate something interesting without much progress towards the original vision.
"With my paintings, for example, I was inspired by one of the more thrilling sensations in Second Life: the feeling of hopping just off the ground, hovering, and zooming closely over the landscape. I wanted to capture that same energy in my real-life paintings, so I tailored my prompts in that direction.
"Once the painting is adjusted in Photoshop, I upload it to Runway, add a text prompt I think will work, and wait for the render. It’s a bit like baking a soufflé—you hope it rises but prepare for the possibility of collapse."
He's even converted an image of his avatar, AM Radio, into a video -- watch on his Instagram here -- through DALL-E and Runway.
AM Radio in SL's The Faraway, 2008
"The resulting output was exciting enough to explore further. It sparked a realization about AI’s potential in art. The experience reminded me of when I first started building with prims in Second Life: the thrill of exploring a new medium of expression with an incredibly low barrier to entry.
"For me it’s a precision thing. Creating felt more precise in Second Life than painting on a canvas. Creating with AI feels more vague than painting, blurry in a way that’s difficult to focus. But this is temporary. We’re in the Daguerreotype era of AI."
All of this, of course, brings up numerous thorny topics about the clash between traditional art and gen AI. Berg is one of the few people highly qualified in both fields to discuss it with nuance. (Along with his SL art, he's an academically trained painter; on the tech side, he was a designer at IBM and more recently, worked on a visualization project for NASA, among other coolness.)
So Berg has some solid back to consider, for instance, the future of traditional art in the AI era, especially as it evolves:
"Although we might view the introduction of AI media through the lens of anti-AI sentiment as many do, that very sentiment could instead be viewed as a renewed appreciation of handcrafted works," he argues. "Regardless of one’s opinion of AI art, it has people talking about art and human agency in ways we haven’t in a very long time.
"The shaman who told stories by the community fire as the shadows dances on the cave walls may have taken exception to written glyphs, wondering how the human experience would be retained on cold stones. Despite the spectacle of AI, these themes and concerns are ancient. I’d be more worried if we looked at AI and rejected it wholesale than having the courage to see what it means to be human in a world in constant tension with the technology we invent."
Does that imply he plans to use gen AI in his own "official" works of art? In other words, works he'd show to the general public in a gallery setting, or even a platform like SL?
"It’s interesting how this question brings up so many thoughts and emotions" Jeff tells me. "When media on a prim was introduced, I briefly experimented with it on one of my sims, using it to emulate ripples in water. I achieved this by sending collision coordinates via a socket connection to JavaScript, which then rendered the rings dynamically. I’d be open to exploring similar concepts to see how AI could enhance interactivity, creating unexpected experiences and uniquely tailored spaces for each user, even within the same virtual environment.
"Genuine AI-driven mesh generation could unlock even more possibilities... I was particularly excited by what I saw at the Autodesk conference in Las Vegas in this direction. At some point, I believe AI will be fast enough to render entire frames as a continuous 2D image stream, delivering an incredibly convincing 3D experience. When that happens, mesh and voxels may become obsolete. For now, what I’m doing feels more like sketching than anything else. If I find a way to use the small bursts of video that AI can generate today for something interesting in-world, I wouldn’t rule out an experiment."
And then again, he's not even sure he'd label his past metaverse projects as "art":
"In virtual worlds," as he puts it, "I was more interested in creating memories through synthetic experiences. Virtual worlds are unique in that way. They allow me to, metaphorically speaking, paint directly onto synapses, with the artwork existing only as memory.
"Perhaps that’s my love of Blade Runner showing through. This is why I felt little remorse for abruptly closing my [SL] sims; they were just the brush and I was ready to put it down. The real art now lives as memory and the nostalgia I attempted to soak them with. The Far Away [above] still exists, and as long as supporters like Ziki want to keep it going, then its work isn’t done." (SLer Ziki Questi keeps the remnants of AM Radio in Second Life.)
"So, to answer your question, I don’t plan my art any more than I plan what my mood will be when I wake up tomorrow. My engineering work sustains me, allowing me to focus on designing for a more sustainable real world. I use the same skills, design, data equity, coding, machine learning, and human experience design but in a way that makes a tangible, positive impact each day.
"Given the chaotic world we live in, I think my sanity depends on that."
Read my long profile of Jeff/AM Radio here and, of course, continued in Making a Metaverse That Matters. And follow him on Instagram here.
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