2001: A Picasso Odyssey

Bhautik Joshi ran 2001 through a style tranfer neural net. It’s the way Kubrick would have wanted it.   

All joking aside, I’d be fascinated to see how some famous directors of the past would have used style transfer. I’d guess that some would be more inventive than others: Hitchcock would use it for a one-off effect, Tarkovsky would work it into everything as long as he could tightly author the result, Welles would incorporate it into a larger illusion. Or painters: Dali would embrace it but be disappointed with the results. And despite how well Van Gogh’s style works for style transfer, I suspect that he would be frustrated if he had to paint them specifically for that purpose. 

Really, I think that Impressionists in general would probably be taken slightly aback at the idea of a machine that can paint Impressionist paintings. The relationship between Impressionism and early photography is complex, but in general the Impressionists were trying to represent what the camera couldn’t capture.

Based on his experiments with monotypes and photography, I suspect that Edgar Degas might have embraced style transfer, though he would probably have made prints and then put pastels on top of them. 

And I’m completely confident that Raphael would have embraced the technology…but would only use it so that his workshop assistants could churn out greeting cards faster.

But they didn’t get the chance. It’s left to the artists of today to find uses for these tools. Like many artistic mediums, cinematography is a language. A language in which the meaning of style transfer hasn’t been found yet. Maybe one of you will be the one to find it. What would you use it to say?