2nd and Grand

"2nd and Grand" -- Mohler. April 1st, 2021. Video: 41sec. 3328px w. 1216px h. Created for the Culver Current sculpture in the Dale Jones Courtyard of City Hall in Culver City. Created with neural style transfer from photographs of the intersection at 2nd and Grand next to the Broad Museum and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles. Special Release for the curated show "Invisible Cities". Mohler explains further: "When I first started this series it was for the sculpture Culver Current, which comes to life with digital art each night in the courtyard at city hall in Culver City. In an effort to capture the essence of the city, I started researching how to use the color and texture in photographs from around the area as the “paint and paintbrush” for the video art projected around sculpture. I wanted the colors of the neighborhood to influence a natural undulating flow and current that appeared on the sculpture. So I used style transfer as an experiment and discovered it allowed me to imagine and dream new skylines, abstract forms, and beautiful moments. Each piece still holds slight hints of the LA Street or the familiar architecture of Culver City found within the source photograph. The process consists of first going out and getting photographs from around Culver City and Los Angeles. I then create the base animations of waves or undulating currents with tools like Cinema 4d. Using tensorflow in the command line, I use neural style transfer to apply the textures and color of the photograph to the base texture of the input video, creating completely new imagery. Harnessing the machine as a tool to imagine.