Ways of Being
A generative video piece for a De School group show, layering GAN imagery, automatic segmentation and a teletext-style palette into a two-poem looping composition.
Ways of Being
A collective exhibition at De School in Amsterdam, December 2023, bringing together work from multiple artists connected to the De School community around questions of identity, presence, and collective practice. The piece Daan showed was a generative video work built from three source techniques layered together: GAN-generated seed imagery, automatic mask segmentation, and a teletext-style colour reduction, composited into a looping sequence around two on-screen poems.
Pipeline
The source material is a GAN-generated frame (seed0054_rlt.png, matching the seed-image naming convention used elsewhere in Daan's GAN experiments) run through Meta's Segment Anything Model (vit_hcheckpoint) to automatically detect and cut every distinct region of the image into its own transparent-background component. A compositing script then builds collages by randomly stacking fifty of those segmented components onto a 512×512 canvas, layering a poem-titled logo image on top and repeating that random stack a hundred times per poem to produce a large set of collage variants. A separate script pixelates and colour-quantizes source frames down to a sixteen-colour palette (black through a full hue wheel via red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta) at a coarse pixel size, reusing the same reduced teletext-style look developed forTeletext GANrather than a fresh palette. The finished sequence is assembled with ffmpeg concat lists: two poem segments (poem_1, three shots;poem_2, four shots), each shot separated by a short empty/blank interstitial, alternating with a looping logo segment across the full edit.
