Hidden Layers 2024
We are pleased to announce that Maria-Teresa and Laura Wagner participated in the Hidden Layers conference, held from June 12-15 in Cologne, Germany. This event, hosted by Köln International School of Design (KISD) brought together a diverse group of experts to discuss and explore the relationship between artificial intelligence and design.
Event Overview: The Hidden Layers conference, organized by the KITeGG research project on design and AI, included a public program of talks, exhibitions, and workshops, as well as internal meetings of the five art and design schools involved. The conference aimed to explore the complexities of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) from a design perspective, addressing themes such as aesthetics, potentials, biases, and dangers within deep neural networks and large datasets.
Talk: Surface Aesthetics and Prompting in AI-Generated Art by Maria-Teresa de Rosa Palmini Maria-Teresa de Rosa Palmini presented a talk on “Surface Aesthetics and Prompting in AI-Generated Art.” Her presentation highlighted methods for creating visual content using text-to-image generative models and discussed the development of a specialized prompt language to achieve high-quality visual results. Through Natural Language Processing (NLP) and visualization techniques, she analyzed prompts that led to popular images on text-to-image platforms. Her analysis revealed a focus on surface aesthetics in prompts, emphasizing conventional beauty, popular visual themes, and the presence of erotic content. The findings provided insights into the language patterns that contribute to highly rated AI-generated art.
Workshop: Stable Diffusion dis-confusion by Laura Wagner Laura Wagner conducted a workshop titled “Stable Diffusion dis-confusion.” This hands-on session offered participants an in-depth look at the components of popular open-source text-to-image systems like Stable Diffusion by Stability AI. Participants explored the pipeline components that tokenize, condition, encode, decode, diffuse, schedule, sample, and upscale. The workshop emphasized the modularity of these pipelines and their potential for collaboration, providing practical experience in manipulating and recombining these modules to create new image-generation processes.
Conference Details:
- Date: June 12-15, 2024
- Location: Köln International School of Design (TH Köln), Ubierring 40, 50678 Cologne
- Themes: AI, Code & Material; AI, Society & (Visual) Culture
- Organizers: Prof. Dr. Lasse Scherffig, Matthias Grund, Jakob Kilian, Dzennifer Zachlod
- Website: https://hiddenlayers.de/