In the opening scene of a strangely serene YouTube video posted this week, colors slide, merge, and morph on screen. Set to an undulating Steve Reich score, the visuals seem appropriately loose and abstract, until around a minute and a half, when tree tops start to form from the blur. Slowly, the images condense and sharpen: What emerges is a constantly changing landscape, as seen from the window of a moving train.
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Only, it’s not an actual landscape—the world the video moves rapidly through was dreamt up by an algorithm, which was created by Google Cardboard co-inventor Damien Henry. Over the course of the video, the algorithm learns how to produce more defined and more accurate images, based on the videos it was trained on. What looks at first like a video art piece, with ethereal images evolving in time to the music, is actually a real-time view of a machine figuring out how to create 56 minutes of footage from a single frame.
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Source: Fast Company