How I Accidentally Created an Infinite Pixel Hellscape

A short apology and a longer explanation

Images courtesy of the author

Look, I may have accidentally summoned some demons from the pixel art underworld. I don’t know what is happening to these little creatures, but it sure doesn’t look good. They appear to be melting and turning into other objects. I’m really quite sorry about all this, but it happened and I’m here to tell you about it.

What is happening?

It all started with the poster hanging above the desk at which I’m writing these lines. It is one in a series by my friends at eBoy, a group of artists whose work you may recognize from a previous collaboration. The poster shows a colorful pixelated isometric view of a busy San Francisco.

You can get the San Francisco poster and more in the eBoy shop

There are other cities, real and fictional, in this Pixorama series too. You will find one for New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and many others. Importantly for this project, the raw images are all available in a big database.

Pixoramas of New York, Berlin, and Tokyo

For this next part, you need to know about generative adversarial networks, or GANs. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, maybe you’ve come across thispersondoesnotexist.com, which shows photos of people who really do not exist at all. Behind the website is a deep neural network that was trained with lots and lots of photos of faces and then asked to make up new ones. GANs have also been used to invent beetles, improve robotic simulation, and much more.

I trained a GAN too, one based on the eBoy database. First, I picked a bunch of images that were large enough and all of a similar style. I then cut them up into many small squares. This way, I could artificially create the tens of thousands of different examples necessary to make the training work.