Domenec’s Infinite Mesh site is, again, nearly done (really!). We have collectively decided to host his final project on an external permanent domain, due to various complications of capturing the react structure within our webflow backend. It’s now living at infinitemesh.co.
To canonize this first AiR work, we are going to be hosting a live twitch screening of some of the best Infinite Mesh films produced by our community. This will be hosted by Domenec, Tyler, and myself, with Domenec available to answer any questions about his workflow or the construction of his tool (which involves multiple LLMs and comfy nodes under the covers).
Next week we will issue an open call for submissions on instagram/discord, so if you have any short story ideas you’d like to see produced - or if you’ve made something already using Infinite Mesh that you particularly like - please send it to air@civitai.com, or leave it as a comment on the open call post, and we may play your work live on the Twitch stream!
Alongside the finalized website, Sufiyan has completed a new design for the gallery section of the site. This “exhibition space” will host images, a written statement, and a video overview of his work featuring artist commentary, all geared at explaining the philosophy behind the work.
Speaking of which, I’ve been trying to get my hands on a copy of a book Domenec has been reading lately: 2021’s The Atlas of Anomalous AI, by Ben Vickers and K-Allado McDowell. A “constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials”, this book sounds like it speaks directly to the the mission of the AiR program itself - drawing disparate connections across mediums to break down barriers between disciplines and destroy silos of discourse. Domenec is quite fortunate to own a copy, and I have humbly requested scans of the book from him to pore over like an absolute nerd.
To continue on a bit of a tangent, the book that inspired the above work is also very much worth looking into: The Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg. A compendium of images and texts compiled in the late 1920s, this tome is an attempt to give visual language to what he described as the "afterlife of antiquity". It's a semiotic study of art and cosmology over the last few thousand years. His goal was to transcend the polarities of academic and political thought, instead giving viewers the opportunity to experience an intuitive, symbolic narrative; a compression of history into a cartographic "thought-space" that visualizes the ebb and flow of history in a fundamentally organic, human way. In its anti-disciplinary collapse of historical narratives across space and time, this book was radically ahead of its time and continues to inspire much of contemporary artistic thought 140 years later: from Walter Benjamin to Decentralized Art practices today. I also see deep connections to this cosmological approach to understanding our world and the infinite, open source nature of Domenec's work at hand.
Ok, back on track. The guts of Infinite Jest may yet get one more massive advance before launch. Domenec has secretly been training an entirely new fine tune of Mistral. This will produce a custom LLM checkpoint trained on thousands of 101 word stories, designed to avoid the typical summarizing/exposition present in current LLM-driven storytelling as well as to generally enhance organic creativity. At this point, it’s been training on 7 GPUs for 6 days straight, so let’s hope it turns out something usable.
We hope you’ll join us for the Infinite Mesh Twitch Live Stream, coming next week.
Noah has successfully secured an LED stage for his next phase: production. For those of you unfamiliar with what that is, it’s basically a full size studio film stage but instead of green fabric backdrops, the walls, floor, and ceiling are all gigantic LED screens. Impressive. So, you can pump a fake background into the scene in real time, and actually link the camera’s viewing angle to the background to create proper parallax motion when dollying around the subject. It’s pretty advanced stuff! However, Noah won’t be relying on this exclusively for his production, since most of his work happens in Comfy, Resolve, and other software suites in the post-production stream.
Casting for his film is slated to start soon, once he has his final budget dialed in. If anyone knows any major-league character actors that do minor-league film work (Bill Pullman, anyone?) please get in touch :). He will be searching for actors to fill the roles of Tara and Rick, and is considering actors that have some comedic chops to offset the general gravity of the film’s theme.
Noah also revealed some recent research into Allelopathy, or the chemical inhibition of one plant’s growth by another. One plant which displays this feature is the Black Walnut tree, a highly prized hardwood. It releases toxic chemicals from its roots that kill any other trees or undergrowth in its immediate proximity, giving it a competitive advantage in its environment (and potentially losing most of it friends). We explored this as a metaphor for both the structure itself and as perhaps a feature of Tara’s psychology. It’s possible that Structure Zero acts as a moral cipher or ethical appraisal for human beings, compelling the unworthy towards death. However, if deemed worthy (meaning, alike to itself?) it could then encourage massive growth. Whether this mechanism is beneficial to humanity or a terrifying tool encouraging some form of alien eugenics is left open to interpretation.
Finally, his comfy workflow is now 100% locked! Here’s a sample of it in action. This is what every live action shot will be fed into to produce the primary aesthetic of the film.
Excitingly, we’ve been discussing releasing this as open source workflow, meaning that theoretically anyone could re-interpret the film by reprocessing it in any different style, or change styles between scenes. Directors have long used scenic stylization to draw conceptual linkages both to other scenes within the film and to reference other influential films. This ability to re-stylize any scene from the film in the future leaves the door open for new narrative implications by simply connecting two scenes via a style that were previously disparate. The mining and reconstructing of future films in this way could be thought of as a cinematic archaeology, of sorts.
Shinji is our latest artist in the Civitai AiR Program. He comes to us from Brooklyn, where he just completed an IRL exhibition at NowHere gallery. This show featured some of the work that relates to his project here at Civitai, namely, his a few custom Atari-style video games that he created from scratch. His mission here is to train a set of several LoRAs in the style of famous Atari artists that can then be used to generate promotional, packaging, and other materials for his new video games.
Since this is his first time training a LoRA, we’ve hooked Shinji up with local Creator Club member FallenIncursio, who has been helping him achieve his desired results. So far, he’s produced two test LoRAs in the style of Hiro Kimura, one trained on 1.5 and one on Pony SDXL, the latter being more successful. We’re proud to be able to support artists who are newer to the AI space by connecting them with experts from our community like Fallen. Shinji is off to a great start!
Last but not least, we are insanely proud to announce that Arvid’s ODDBIRDS project has been selected as a finalist for the 103rd Annual ADC Awards - a huge honor in the animation industry and beyond!
“The ADC Annual Awards is celebrating 103 years of excellence in design and craft. This iconic award show honors the best creative talent and groundbreaking work across many different creative disciplines including advertising, digital media, graphic and publication design, packaging and product design, motion, gaming, experiential and architecture, photography, illustration, fashion design and all points in between.“
His work is a finalist in the AI Process category, and we can’t wait to see the results come May 15th. They are hosting an awards ceremony in NYC - fingers crossed he will have to attend :).
This week, Arvid and I also had a meeting with folks from ONBD, a new social platform for digital artists focused on art collecting. We’ve been discussing creating a set of collectible ODDBIRDS Kingdom characters to go along with the release of his short film at the end of his Civitai Residency. This would be released in partnership with ONBD, with their team providing technical support to produce the collection.
We’ve been thinking about this as similar to picking up the latest collectible figurine from the Marvel universe after a new Avengers drops - a progressive way to both support the artist (because, let’s face it, ODDBIRDS won’t make Marvel money) and give his fans access to collecting a piece of his cinematic universe. We're excited for the community driven possibilities in this space.
Well, that caps our Studio Update for this round. Be sure to stay tuned for Domenec’s Twitch stream next week and send in your submission for a chance to be featured!
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