Forspoken uses AI to generate ever-changing abstract visuals from user text input, creating a mesmerising, emotionally resonant, and dynamically evolving digital artwork.

Forspoken is an exploration of the profound connection between human emotion and the visual language of form and colour. The interactive art installation leverages AI image generation in realtime. The piece investigates the connections between language, emotion and artistic expression, with the goal of encouraging the audience to reflect on the interplay between the rational and the intuitive, the cognitive and the sensory. The piece was displayed at Orleans House Gallery (London) as a part of the Future Worlds show in April 2024.

As visitors interact with the piece by entering their own text, they are invited to contemplate the deep, often subconscious ways in which abstract visual elements can communicate emotional experience. The installation investigates the connections between language, emotion and artistic expression - with the help of an AI that has digested and assimilated several years of paintings and photographs and other images - in a way that encourages the audience to reflect on the interplay between the rational and the intuitive, the cognitive and the sensory.

Forspoken is built using TouchDesigner and StreamDiffusionTD (a plugin based on the open source image generating AI tool: Stable Diffusion).

The images are generated in real-time at approximately five frames per second. In Forspoken, the StreamDiffusionTD algorithm has been tuned to use two text prompts, one is the word ‘abstract’ and the other is the text that users can input. The algorithm is also tuned to use the words ‘face’, ‘cartoon’, ‘character’, ‘city’, and ‘landscape’ as negative prompts, in order to keep the rendered images as abstract patterns. Five LFOs (low frequency oscillators) are used in TouchDesigner to vary the noise input for StreamDiffusionTD as well as the seed number (the starting point that the algorithm uses to begin generating images).

Here is some footage of the installation in action: