Peter Nelson: Art and Technology Combined

The combination of art and technology, frequently called “arts tech,” is a rising global phenomena. The convergence of the creative and technological sectors for arts tech will generate new artistic, cultural and economic opportunities, and there is significant related research occurring at HKBU.

Dr Peter Nelson, Assistant Professor in the Academy of Visual Arts (AVA), has varied research interests, including painting and drawing, art history, and visual studies. But his work with computer games and computer graphics make him a perfect candidate to support Hong Kong in its goal of arts tech growth, with the Augmented Creativity Lab at HKBU allowing for a set-up where he can work with colleagues from the AVA, Music, and Computer Science amongst various disciplines on arts tech-related projects.

Recently, Dr Nelson has been working with 3D computer graphics and machine learning towards a user-friendly automatic interface for 3D models of various objects.

Landscape Forms: A Work-in-progress

“Landscape Forms” uses 3D models of trees produced with a voxel-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Using a poetic audio-visual animation, it cycles through the training epochs of the GAN to animate the process of the system learning to produce the three-dimensional form of trees.

The project employs a variety of animation techniques, including particle morphing, vertex shape keys and latent space walks. It explores forms produced by the GAN that appear reminiscent of modernist sculptors such as Henry Moore or Constantin Brâncuși. The work includes a musical accompaniment by Dr Roberto Alonso Trillo, a HKBU colleague in the Department of Music, which uses a GAN system to generate a reworking of Romantic music. You can watch the Landscape Forms video here.

The Data Stones: Experimental Data Visualisation

Another recent project of Dr Nelson’s is “Data Stones”, which explores how we can find patterns and meaning in the datasets that record our lives and interactions with others. Utilising the ancient Chinese technique of looking for meaning in the shapes of stones to conduct this project, Dr Nelson downloaded over 60,000 messages from every email account and app that he and his partner use to communicate. Using the logic of sedimentary stone, the lower layers chart the older messages and the upper layers the most recent. The length of each message shapes the profile of the stone. The content of each individual message is converted into a bitmap image, where each letter, space and punctuation mark is transcoded into a greyscale value. This image is used to create the fine details on the stone so that every message is encoded directly into the surface. The full project description and accompanying videos can be found here.

We look forward to seeing Dr Nelson’s current works when they are complete. Please check out his profile to see his other multidisciplinary artworks.