PRIVATE PAGE - Glintenkamp R&D • Experimentation and Skills Development: Archive-Inspired Generative AI Sound and Image

When I received a DYCP grant in 2021, I used excerpts from preexisting archival oral history recordings from the British Library to create the soundtrack for a short experimental film, The Artist’s Experience: 1950s London.  For the film’s visuals, I used archival and contemporary photographic imagery to create animated collaged scenes that illustrated the oral history content. I learned how to “cut out” visual elements using Photoshop and experimented with animating the cutouts using video editing software.  A 3 minute compilation of  excerpts from the film I produced as part of my DYCP experience can be viewed at the bottom of this page. 

An R&D grant will allow me to explore and evolve a new way of working, now with generative AI tools, to creat sound and imagery inspired by archival materials. This is an essential part of my professional development that will allow me to keep apace with current trends and stay competitive. Previous techniques I’ve used to work creatively with archival materials are now outdated.  For the R&D project, there are no preexisting archival audio recordings of the creative personalities whose words will be featured in the experimental videos. I will learn how to generate voice dramatizations with AI systems, and “direct” those voice performances. For the visuals, instead of cutting out and animating pre-existing imagery, I will explore new techniques to create imagery with generative AI,  inspired by the voice content. The generated video content may use archival imagery as a starting inspiration, but will the end result will be unique visual expressions that support the stories and ideas delivered by the voices.  This is a next step in the evolution of the approach I explored and developed in the DYCP work.

The portraits and words below present just a few of the many intriguing creative personalities that came together in Mexico City in the 1920s. The faces and attitudes seem so very modern, yet these portraits were taken, and words were written, over 100 years ago. The words of individuals like these will make up the soundtrack of the R&D experimental films.

Creative colleagues Federico Marín, Jean Charlot and Tina Modotti. Charlot draws on Modotti's back. Charlot was a French artist and art historian. He moved to Mexico in 1921, where he played an instrumental role in the Mexican Mural Renaissance.
Words of Charlot: During 1920-25 Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera groped through their first mural tasks, not yet knowing where they would emerge...to have assisted at the birth of a national style is a rare event, as well worth recording as the birth of a volcano.

Artist Ione Robinson was 19 when she traveled to Mexico City and worked with Diego Rivera on his murals at the National Palace in Mexico City.
​Words of Robinson: Rivera took me to his studio and had me paint a picture in front of him.  He gave me his brushes to work with as well as his palette and paints. The brushes were stuck together, and the palette was caked high with smears of old paint. Then he gave me gasoline instead of turpentine to mix the colors. He insists that it is better than turpentine. 

Carmen Mondragón Valseca was a Mexican poet and painter. She was inspired by post-revolutionary Mexican interests in connections to indigenous cultures. She changed her name to Nahui Olín in 1922. 
​Words of Olin: My spirit and body are forever mad with thirst for those new worlds that I go on endlessly creating.

Katherine Anne Porter was a prominent American writer, and author of  ‘Outline of Mexican Popular Arts’.
​Words of  Porter from her 1923 essay ‘Why I Write About Mexico’: The renaissance of Mexican art...a deeply racial and personal art…their native arts are in everything they do and are…I like best the passion for individual expression without hypocrisy.

3 minute compilation of excerpts from my 2021 DYCP film: