Denis.
Creative Technologist
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Creative Coding

Neural Drift

An AI-assisted visual meditation tool. A neural network interprets live camera input and transforms it into drifting, painterly abstractions. The result is a hybrid space between photography, painting, and machine perception.

Core idea. What does a camera see when it stops trying to be accurate? Neural Drift feeds live webcam frames through a lightweight style-transfer network trained on early 20th-century landscape painters. The output is a real-time oil-on-canvas abstraction of whatever the camera points at.

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Before and after — raw camera input (left) processed through the style-transfer model (right).

Architecture. The model is a MobileNet-v2 encoder paired with a custom decoder, quantised to run client-side via TensorFlow.js at 12fps on a laptop. Latent-space interpolation between style references creates continuous drift even when the camera input is static, giving the piece its meditative quality.

ND
Year
2024
Category
Creative Coding
Role
Director, Designer