Five Directions

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The Five Directions tutorial series is a collaboration with Jason Baerg to help educate artists and scholars about the principles, history, current practice and future of machine learning and its use in art practice.

Originally designed for a group of Indigenous artists and scholars as part of a larger project spearheaded by Jason Bearg, this tutorial series is now publicly available thanks to Interaccess.

This is a series of 5 hour-long narrated presentations intended to teach the history, current practice and future of using machines and machine learning (A.I.) to create art. Rather than a how-to guide, the focus is on understanding how to think about and interact with digital data and machine tools ethically.

The tutorials are dense! They are designed to be experienced in sections, at your own pace. They function somewhere between a video, a recorded video chat presentation, and an online slideshow.

There are also PDFs of the tutorials available.

How it was made

These tutorials were made in 2021, a bit before the explosion of text-2-image AI image generation technologies. I used the precursors to technologies that quickly became much better during 2022, so many of the images used as slide backgrounds have a particular look that is specific to a very short period of time. At some point I may go back and redo the imagery, but working with the tools that I had at the time I tried to use them for what they were capable of - abstract imagery whose prompts came from the text of the presentation (even though often image done for one prompt were repurposed for other sections that matched them better).

Art forms

Software credits

Special thanks

Sources

This project is open source and I encourage people to reuse and remix any portion of it.

https://github.com/RKelln/5-directions

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Funding and Support

Support and funding for the project was provided by: