Virtual Unreality

For this release, Pan-Pot collaborated with independent researcher and transdisciplinary artist Portrait XO to materialize a unique audiovisual piece that’s about what it means to co-create with AI in the context of our hyper-digital realities. Since the pandemic challenged humanity with socializing being limited and pushed further into digitizing the way we stay connected, ‘Virtual Unreality’ were words that came together to express the current state of redefining what reality even means within this hyper virtual state of living.

There were several layers of AI approaches for this piece using a synthetic voice designed by Birds on Mars of Portrait XO’s talking voice, and several tools from Pollinations.AI in 2022 when there were several open source AI models available. First, the fabricated words ‘Virtual Unreality’ were used as input for GPT-NEO on Pollinations.AI - an AI text generator. Based on the answers, Pan-Pot and Portrait XO curated their favourite outputs:

‘Virtual unreality is the space around us
Unreality is an illusion of light and movement, suspended in space
Where it’s hard to tell the difference between your dream and reality
Life is a dream and we are the dreamers’

These official lyrics were then translated into AI-generated audio reactive 3D sculptures created by Iv with their custom 3D font.

Once the track was finalized and mastered by Henne Müller, the audio was used as data input to create the official music video. The video was created using 2 AI Google Colab notebooks on Pollinations.AI: Lucid Sonic Dreams and Text-to-Image VQGAN+CLIP (Video) by Portrait XO.

The audio reactive 3D sculptures of the AI voice were generated by an untrained custom-made AI model by Iv showing the underlying way of thinking and processing data that machines use. Created as a way to visualize randomly initialized neural networks, these sculptures became digital entities symbolizing the essence of ‘virtual unreality’.

As the word ‘metaverse’ is constantly being redefined with the birth of Web 3.0, ‘Virtual Unreality’ also has a portal on https://newart.city/show/virtualunreality where people are invited to fly through a 3D online space and leave us comments. Concept by Portrait XO and designed by Iv, this space offers an experience of the track in 3D with spatial audio, a beautifully coded environment, and fly through 3D AI sculptures in 360. We would love to hear how you feel about your state of virtual unreality.

CREDITS:

Music by Pan-Pot feat. Portrait XO
AI audiovisuals + Concept by Portrait XO
AI-generated audio reactive 3D sculptures by Iv