Lei Han and Lorraine Walsh
HOMAGE TO ARTHUR CLARKE PILLSBURY, 2021
Time-lapse animation
Duration 5:07, dimensions variable

Arthur C. Pillsbury, an early pioneer in time-lapse botany photography, was famous for his experimental films at Yosemite National Park. In the 1920s, Pillsbury brought his then-cutting-edge cameras to the Missouri Botanical Garden where he researched botanical time-lapse photography.

Honoring Pillsbury’s legacy, the artists used time-lapse photography to capture the early phenological stages of a vine plant. A dataset with over a thousand images of a grapevine plant was captured on a DSLR camera with a 100 mm Macro lens. These images were used to train a model through StyleGAN (a type of generative adversarial network) which has been used to generate and customize synthetic images that look real. Latent Spacewalk ( the latent space is a representation of compressed data in which similar data points are closer together in space) animations were generated from that model and juxtaposed with the real time-lapse videos.