Why is !!Con such a special place? There's a feeling of transition when we go from the !!Con world back to the tech world at large; Joshua explores the feeling of that, and the question of how we can take some of that feeling back with us into the world at large. #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west A new project, StyleGAN, represents faces in high-fidelity in 9000 dimensions, and can produce high-quality interpolation between those faces! They even provide pre-trained models on 70k faces from Flickr! These 9000 dimensions represent everything from facial pose to hair styles to background to skin tone and more. We can try to find encodings of several drag queens, in drag and out of drag, and use those differences to interpolate our own faces. This is available online as well, with your webcam, at https://leebutterman.com/drag-makeover. #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west Sometimes you want to find out some information about a neural net in PyTorch while it runs. Like what if you wanted to do some math of your own on the math that happens inside the network? You can do that with hooks! Hooks can go on each module of a neural network to spy on the black box and whisper its secrets to you. No neural net will keep its secrets hidden from your perceptive functions. #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west My virtual reality hair-cutting game Bizarre Barber started as a graduate thesis, so I couldn’t afford to hire professional 3D modelers and riggers to help out with character designs. My team decided to employ a procedural pipeline and write a tool that would allow us to generate thousands of characters. With the help of Houdini, Vex and Python, we set up a generator to make a variety of cute birds and mutants with bold hairstyles and automatically export them to the game engine for further processing. Sound awesome? Well, little did I know about human biases that would start to emerge when an artist turns into a curator and has to make tough decisions… #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west Twelve discounted purses, obsolete Cisco hardware found on eBay, one cube. This talk shows how

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west Since I have a car in New York City, my car is subject to the city’s alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations. This means most nights I need to move my car before the early morning street cleaning that happens in my neighborhood. I had developed a nightly routine around moving my car before I go to bed. I am sometimes a bit too good at this, and I often move my car on days I don’t need to. Since alternate-side-of-the-street parking is often canceled on holidays or days where there is bad weather, there is a Twitter account, @NYCASP, which posts daily and whenever there is an emergency situation. I used Python, Twilio and the Twitter API to solve this problem for myself so I get a text message whenever I don’t need to move my car. #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west Ever received a beautiful geometric gift box (from a Japanese pastry shop, for example) and wondered how it was made? It turns out there’s a whole world of packaging design techniques and patterns! Unfortunately, many of these patterns exist only in print via packaging design books. These diagrams need to be translated to digital formats before they can be easily cut on a machine and assembled by hand! In this talk, I’ll share how I built a web app called SVG Tracer (https://svg-tracer.glitch.me/) to translate photos of packaging diagrams to digital SVGs that can be directly sent to any Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) desktop cutter. I’ll introduce some useful JavaScript SVG libraries and show some pretty boxes that I created with the tool! By the end of the talk, you’ll learn about how SVGs are an awesome medium for bridging art, programming, and fabrication. #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west This is a dance inspired by broadcast audio through RSS, technology obsolescence, Git version controls, and 3-2-1 backups. Sounds recorded from earlier talks will be regenerated to create auditory memories of early digital networking and are made tangible through isolated limbed branches that build to a feeling of potential completion. It soon breaks down as segments are gradually destroyed due to algorithmically-controlled centralized over-saturation. This is an exploration of existing digital archiving techniques that are missing components to recreate the full computational environment. linkRot is a dance that serves to emulate the physical euphoria that internet content creation permits to the digital decay that comes with loss (or is there even a feeling of loss?). #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020