Compressed Cinema (with Casey Reas)
Compressed Cinema is a book that collects images from Casey Reas' Untitled Film Stills series. I was commissioned to write a text in response to the images. The texts I wrote are included in the book, interleaved among the images, section by section. Casey generated the images in the book with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) trained on films. My texts are "ekphrastic unravelings" of these images: I first wrote laconic, dense descriptions of each image, and then used the mask-filling functionality of a language model (BART) to iteratively "uncompress" those descriptions. More photographs of the book.