Team: Yehwan Song, Iacopo Neri, Ludovica Schaerf, Pepe Ballesteros, Valentine Bernasconi, Darío Negueruela del Castillo
Newly Formed re-imagines the city of Helsinki through the collections of HAM Helsinki Art museum. It is a collaborative research-driven inquiry into how an AI Entity could co-curate the collections of the museum.

You are flying over Helsinki, a series of spheres appear, containing panoramic images of locations in the city that have been re-imagined by the AI based on the artworks of the Helsinki Art Museum. Use the arrows on the screen or on the keyboard to navigate.

You can click in each sphere to travel inside and be immersed in the panorama. The geometry of the spaces in the original locations are maintained, but the content of the images is a vision generated by the AI Entity.

Once inside the panorama, you will see some smaller spheres located in certain places of the panorama. These are the nearest locations, to which you can navigate by clicking on them.

For more information on the methodology and the models adopted, go to here

Disclaimer: In this project, the AI takes inspiration from the original artworks, but generates a completely new image which is not a collage of the original artwork. We have taken that decision consciously to respect the artistic integrity of the artworks. The project engages in what is called ‘distant viewing’, assuming a detached and agnostic reading of both the art collection and the city. Therefore, the images produced do not pretend to emerge from a culturally informed understanding of Finnish culture or Helsinki, but visually explore what deep learning foundation models can or cannot understand about the rich and fascinating art collections of the Helsinki Art Museum.

All images of artworks © HAM Helsinki Art Museum and the original authors, All Rights Reserved. See https://ham.finna.fi for details and photo credits.