Tag Archives: Art

It’s time to start sketching, Canada. Doodle 4 Google is back!

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Canadian YouTube stars Mitch and Greg of AsapSCIENCE 
Submissions are now open for Doodle 4 Google!
If you’ve watched our videos, you already know how much we love science... and art! Whenever we visit the Google homepage, we’re always tickled to find a doodle, which combines the best of both. Google doodles are fun illustrations of the Google logo that celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists, pioneers, and scientists -- everything from the discovery of water on Mars to Canadian inventor Sandford Fleming’s 190th birthday.

Now with Doodle 4 Google, kids have the chance to see their artwork on the Google homepage for the whole country to enjoy. Doodle 4 Google is a nationwide competition, inviting students from kindergarten to Grade 12 to redesign the Google logo.*

As Canada blows out a whole lot of candles this year for its 150th birthday, what better way to celebrate than by imagining what the next 150 years will look like? That’s why Google is asking students to submit doodles based on the theme: “What I see for Canada’s future is…”.

Creating the top doodle comes with major perks: not only will their artwork adorn the Google.ca homepage for a day, but the winner will receive a $10,000 university scholarship, a $10,000 technology grant for his/her school, and a paid trip to the final Doodle 4 Google event in June. For more details, check out g.co/d4gcanada.

To help judge this year’s competition, the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, En Masse co-founder Jason Botkin, president of the National Inuit Youth Council Maatalii Okalik, and Google Doodler Sophie Diao, will join us as your panel of esteemed doodle judges.

When we come up with themes for our videos, we look to cool things in science and tech for inspiration. If you know a young artist that may need a little nudge to get their creative juices flowing, we’ve worked with Google to create classroom activities that will help parents, teachers and students brainstorm, design and submit their doodles.

Participating is easier than ever. This year, students can submit a doodle made from almost any medium….including code! Ladies Learning Code created an online tutorial offering inspiration and a step-by-step guide to coding a Google doodle. Check it out here.

In Toronto in April? All throughout the month of April, parents and kids can visit the Art Gallery of Ontario to get inspired and create a doodle during Family Sundays.

Teachers and parents can download entry forms on the Doodle 4 Google site. Doodles can be uploaded digitally to Google’s site or mailed directly. Submissions are due on May 2nd. There’s no limit to the number of doodles from any one school or family... Just remember, only one doodle per student.

Let’s get our doodle on, Canada!

Posted by Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown, AsapSCIENCE
*Entrants need a parent or legal guardian’s permission (and signature on the entry form) in order to participate. Residents of Quebec must be at least thirteen years of age. Please see full terms and eligibility requirements here: doodles.google.ca/d4g/rules.html

Exploring the Intersection of Art and Machine Intelligence

Posted by Mike Tyka, Software Engineer

In June of last year, we published a story about a visualization techniques that helped to understand how neural networks carried out difficult visual classification tasks. In addition to helping us gain a deeper understanding of how NNs worked, these techniques also produced strange, wonderful and oddly compelling images.

Following that blog post, and especially after we released the source code, dubbed DeepDream, we witnessed a tremendous interest not only from the machine learning community but also from the creative coding community. Additionally, several artists such as Amanda Peterson (aka Gucky), Memo Akten, Samim Winiger, Kyle McDonald and many others immediately started experimenting with the technique as a new way to create art.
“GCHQ”, 2015, Memo Akten, used with permission.
Soon after, the paper A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style by Leon Gatys in Tuebingen was released. Their technique used a convolutional neural network to factor images into their separate style and content components. This in turn allowed the creation, by using a neural network as a generic image parser, of new images that combined the style of one with the content of another. Once again it took the creative coding community by storm and immediately many artists and coders began experimenting with the new algorithm, resulting in Twitter bots and other explorations and experiments.
The style transfer algorithm crosses a photo with a painting style; for example Neil deGrasse Tyson in the style of Kadinsky’s Jane Rouge Bleu. Photo by Guillaume Piolle, used with permission.
The open-source deep-learning community, especially projects such as GitXiv, hugely contributed to the spread, accessibility and development of these algorithms. Both DeepDream and style transfer were rapidly implemented in a plethora of different languages and deep learning packages. Immediately others took the techniques and developed them further.
“Saxophone dreams” - Mike Tyka.
With machine learning as field moving forward at a breakneck pace and rapidly becoming part of many -- if not most -- online products, the opportunities for artistic uses are as wide as they are unexplored and perhaps overlooked. However the interest is growing rapidly: the University of London is now offering a course on Machine learning and art. NYU ITP offers a similar program this year. The Tate Modern’s IK Prize 2016 topic: Artificial Intelligence.

These are exciting early days, and we want to continue to stimulate artistic interest in these emerging technologies. To that end, we are announcing a two day DeepDream event in San Francisco at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, aimed at showcasing some of the latest exploration of the intersection of Machine Intelligence and Art, and spurring discussion focused around future directions:
  • Friday Feb 26th: DeepDream: The Art of Neural Networks, an exhibit consisting of 29 neural network generated artworks, created by artists at Google and from around the world. The works will be auctioned, with all proceeds going to the Gray Area Foundation, which has been active in supporting the intersection between arts and technology for over 10 years.
  • On Saturday Feb 27th: Art and Machine Learning Symposium, an open one-day symposium on Machine Learning and Art, aiming to bring together the neural network and the creative coding communities to exchange ideas, learn and discuss. Videos of all the talks will be posted online after the event.
We look forward to sharing some of the interesting works of art generated by the art and machine learning community, and being part of the discussion of how art and technology can be combined.