I love you for the day (ILYFTD) is an installation by Matthias Maurer and Guillaume Massol situated at the unlikely intersection between mass surveillance and poetry.
The installation is looking around, focusing from time to time on passers-by. Once focused on a person it’s tracking his/her face and breaks it down into fragments, generating a constantly evolving mosaic of eyes, mouthes and noses.
As it watches it is generating lyrics and music based on facial features. While on idle mode it reload bits of previously tracked faces and keeps on generating soundscapes and lyrics.
The face tracking algorithm is built on a Convolutional Neural Network. It uses a model trained on thousands of different faces.
Text and music are created by a multi-layer Recurrent Neural Network. A model trained on love songs generates the text of the installation character by character. While another model – trained on heavy metal – generates the melody of the music which is slowed down and played with electronic instruments.
The name of the installation has also been generated as well as the music of the video.
