Self/Object | Live Style Transfer & Self-portrait

Self/Object (2019) explores my personal connection with objects through the creation of experimental portraits in various artistic styles. The objects I chose include a playing card, hourglass, flower, mirror, and spinning top. These self-portraits reflect my feelings and imagination inspired by these objects.

The process of creating these self-portraits in different artistic styles also led me to conduct a style transfer experiment based on my own artworks. While many computational artists have explored using models of famous paintings to create style transfer effects or generate new artworks, I wondered: what if I used the artistic style of my own works for style transfer?

To explore this idea, I selected three of my artworks for the experiment. Below is a video recording of my style transfer website. The website uses a webcam to capture video and applies live style transfer based on my artistic style.

Process:

The self-portraits were photographed and edited by me using Adobe Photoshop. For the web-based fast style transfer, I first trained a model on my artworks using deeplearn.js. Once the machine learning process was complete, I imported the trained models and developed the website using ml5.js, p5.js, HTML, and CSS.

Here are my original self-portraits and the image of style transfer results:

Playing Card, 2019
Flower, 2019
Sandglass, 2019

All Self-Portraits: