Flow powers two public artworks for London Design Festival

At London Design Festival we look to give a platform to bold, experimental ideas, bringing them to the widest possible audience. We believe everyone is interested in design. Projects like these ask them to think about it. We first collaborated with Google Arts & Culture in 2018 to bring Es Devlin's AI powered public artwork to Trafalgar Square, and this year we together continue our support of artistic experimentation with AI with a striking new public sculpture by Paul Cocksedge and a new AI video work by Ben Cullen Williams created in collaboration with Google DeepMind Research Scientist Jason Baldridge.

What Nelson Sees by Paul Cocksedge

Experience the view from Nelson's column, Trafalgar Square. Credit: Mark Cocksedge

'What does Nelson see?' Credit: Mark Cocksedge

Teleport to Nelson's view and see London's evolution through past, present and future. Credit: Mark Cocksedge

London-based designer Paul Cocksedge has taken over the iconic Trafalgar Square with a sculpture featuring intersecting tubes that serve as telescopic viewing portals, lifting your gaze 50 meters high to see London from Nelson's vantage point. Inside each portal, you don't just see the present, the public are taken on a journey through time, brought to life with Google's AI filmmaking tool Flow, powered by Veo.

Cocksedge worked closely with Google Arts & Culture Lab to create moving vignettes that capture the essence of London's relentless transformation. You rewind to see the city as it was a century ago (when Nelson came to be in the square)-with horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps-and then fast-forward into potential futures, such as a city with more local food production and streets adapted for a hotter climate, informed through conversations with Ricky Burdett, Director of the Cities Unit at LSE.

The creation process was collaborative and iterative. Flow enabled Cocksedge to realise a layer to this design, otherwise impossible, inviting the public to reflect on London's past and visualise its possible futures.

Self Portrait by Ben Cullen Williams

A still from Self Portrait. The image is created by artist Ben Cullen Williams with Google AI.

A still from Self Portrait. The image is created by artist Ben Cullen Williams with Google AI.

A still from Self Portrait. The image is created by artist Ben Cullen Williams with Google AI.

At the festival's Design London Shoreditch exhibition, artist Ben Cullen Williams presents a new video artwork titled 'Self Portrait,'. The work dives into the centuries-old question of what a self-portrait can be, using the capabilities of generative AI to explore themes of identity, technology, and expression.

Williams began by prompting Google Gemini to describe itself, which led to a dialogue that became the visual framework for the project. To define the visual world a series of models were fine-tuned using Ben's own photographs in collaboration with Google DeepMind Research Scientist Jason Baldrige. This process allowed Google's generative AI image model Imagen to generate images that were imbued with some of the qualities of his photographs - Williams was interested in this blurring of lines between the creator and the tool.

Hundreds of these images were then fed into Flow, where Williams sculpted them into a final, looping video work. He describes this experimental process as "akin to working in a photographic darkroom."

This new video work dives into the centuries-old question of what a self-portrait is and what it can be, using the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence to explore themes of landscape, identity, technology, human endeavor and expression.

• Arts & Culture
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