Down to the Holograph 2.0 @ Kultursciok @ Domicella Festa Fresca Festival

“Down to the Holograph” is a Machine-Learning generated audio-visual experience of possibilities based on the idea of Hong Kong as a magnifying holograph for the world, a mini-garden in its infinite diversity. Video interpolation generated using StyleGANS2 on 360 photos taken around Hong Kong, music accompaniment generated using Google Magenta on the artist’s improvised melody, and the accompanying text generated from GPT-2 pretrained on the artist’s poetry.

Machine learning has become part of our toolkit for seeing how the world moves, hear the sounds we create, and tell us how to interpret our surroundings. Down to the Holograph immerses us in three dimensions of expression, creating a 360 view of our surroundings that constantly changes around us, showing the possibilities that we collected throughout our lives in one fell swoop. Just as video expanded the temporal dimension of photography, and virtual reality (VR) expanded the spatial dimension of video, machine learning (ML) too expands our capability to see, as it compresses the shared knowledge in spatio-temporal dimensions to a single, potentially interactive paradigm. In this work, a summary of over 5000 360-photos of Hong Kong are summarized by ML traversing through the space of possibilities, showing us how the images we collected relate to each other. Slowly we can perceive the water dissolving into buildings as the island becomes a mountain, and then the mountain becomes a building in turn. These perceptions remind us of the commonalities of these perspectives we observe, so that in one minute we can see the world as we saw it in one year’s worth of photos.

Down to the Holograph was presented at Osage Gallery, Hong Kong, as part of the Ars Electronica Artificial Intentionalities exhibition curated by Ann Mak and chaired by Maurice Benayoun: Ars Electronica Online. Further online exhibition was developed for Ars Electronica Hong Kong Garden. Down to the Holograph was part of the Unduplicated exhibition at Videotage Hong Kong. It was part of the Domicella Festival at Kulturfactory, Domicella Italy in 2025.