Hello and welcome to the NVIDIA AI Podcast.
I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. In previous episodes of the AI Podcast, we've spoken with artists who are leveraging deep learning to push their artistic expression to new heights.
In late 2020, for example, Pindar Van Arman joined the show to talk about painting robots he designed to explore the differences between human and computational creativity.
Today, we're dipping our toes back into the world of AI art, but from a slightly broader perspective.
Scott Birnbaum is CEO and co-founder of Morph Gallery, where he works with artists who use cutting edge technologies, including AI, deep learning, robotics, and neuroscience to create one of a kind works of fine art.
Scott's here to give us an overview of the world of AI art, to talk about the artists and events he's been busy with this year, and hopefully to explain to me exactly why NFTs are getting so much attention right now.
Scott, thank you so much for making the time and welcome to the NVIDIA AI Podcast.
Thanks so much for having me. I'm just very excited to be here.
And I'm just having so much fun. This space is just exploding right now.
You know, I, as is often the case with these shows, I want to ask a simple question and sit back and listen, because I am thrilled to be talking to you and to learn more about. about this space.
So why don't I just open it up to you by saying, tell us about Morph, and about your work, and maybe that can lead us into a little bit of an explainer of what's going on with AI and other forms of digital art.
Yeah, if you look at what's happening, it's pretty incredible.
I have a long history in technology. and got very interested in digital art back more than a decade ago.
And I saw that being an explosive movement, just like you saw books, movies, and music all move to digital.
I really saw art moving in that direction as well.
And now it's actually gone exponential. and the digital art movement because of what's happening in NFT and moving art, artificial intelligence.
And the new tools that artists have have really just enabled this new, exciting field of digital art.
So where should we start? You sent over some videos and some other materials that I was enjoying getting ready for this talk.
You've been busy this summer. I mentioned last year we spoke with Pindar Van Arman, who's an artist who you've worked with very closely.
So should we begin with Morf or should we begin?
Yeah, I'll tell you a little bit about Morph, how it was created and what we're doing.
So I co-founded Morph Gallery with two amazing artists, Steve Matson.
Steve went on a 30-year journey with a vision of trying to make a physical canvas painting come to life.
And that journey took him into Hollywood.
And he worked on some of the top films. things like Star Wars, Life of Pi, just an incredible artist, but he's an artist by background.
And now these new tools that are becoming available has allowed him to have his vision actually come to life.
Our next co-founder, Nick Donald. really saw the movement of what was happening in the digital art space and how do you protect, how do you store, how do you play back art?
And he created a very simple but powerful device called the Art Stick, which Morph Gallery uses for our artists. and for our collectors to enable you to be able to have the most sophisticated, cutting edge, highly collectible art onto a single stick that plugs into your TV.
No longer are you confined to hiding your acquisitions in your wallet.
You could actually showcase these on these amazing 4K and 8K screens inside your home.
But Morph Gallery came together with the three of us with a vision to enable artists to that are using cutting edge technologies, using artificial intelligence, neuroscience and robotics and have a place where they could showcase this art.
And then for collectors that are interested in this space, a Morph Gallery is providing those kind of things.
And the types of art that we work with just even still blow me away.
So you mentioned Pindar, for example. Pindar... started with a dream of having a robot that could actually take away some of the mundane tasks of painting.
So backgrounds and proportion. And then he created a vision of having his robots actually have some ability to do some thinking on their own. and create their own types and styles of art.
And he's really been explosive in the NFT space.
And we're really proud to work with Pindar, but we're also doing like other Other really amazing things like Steve Mattson's art, these physical paintings that come to life, it'll take him... anywhere between eight and 10 months to produce a single piece.
It's made up of thousands of individual artworks. and these come together in these amazing moving paintings.
But also you've had other folks at NVIDIA that have been highlighted in Jensen's keynote speech at GTC, right?
Where... we're able to take artwork that's been lost to the ages and recreate it using artificial intelligence.
The research team out of London, AXIA Palace, is just doing amazing things in that space and creating these NeoMasters which are paintings that were painted over by the original artists or sometimes even a different artist, recovered and resurrected using artificial intelligence.
And then people like Daniel Ambrosie. Daniel's doing like really amazing things where he can make photographs actually dream.
And he's been working on these technologies directly with Google and NVIDIA engineers. to create these incredible dreamscapes and abstract dreams, which have been featured again at GTC.
We're also working with other amazing artists like Kevin Mack.
Kevin just was a finalist at Biennale for his work with artificial life. and how he uses neuroscience for people to be able to interact with his artworks.
And it's just incredible. So Morph Gallery was created to be a gallery that is able to showcase and present these cutting-edge artworks by cutting-edge artists.
I was listening to you talk, I was thinking of a video or a couple of videos I was watching where you gave some talks, some live sessions, I think, and detailing the work of these artists who you just mentioned.
And the NeoMasters project and the work around that, that sort of thing, I find, I find fascinating this idea of using AI to kind of delve into the existing works of past masters or present day masters for that matter, and kind of getting into what can you do with training and AI to recognize and then even create in the style of a human artist.
And so I'm sure that I'm not even scratching the surface or categorizing this correctly, but I sort of, my limited knowledge of what AI and deep learning are being used to do in the visual arts is kind of broken into these buckets of doing sort of the grunt work, as you mentioned, that Pindar, and we've talked to some VFX artists who are working in Hollywood and video games and such, they're able to sort of use AI as almost apprentices who can do the background work or, take a character and create a fleet of characters that can be used in a video game, that kind of thing.
And then there's the work of generating new art, teaching a robot, so to speak, to struggle as a human artist might struggle with okay, what's my next move in creating this painting or this piece of art?
How do you see the artwork? Because you're obviously more immersed in it than I am.
Are there certain buckets of things that people are doing as I think of it, or am I way off here and it's actually something different?
No, if you think at the technologies that have really moved the art world forward, So if you think about the paintbrush and the ability to have that and having paint in the tube and being able to paint outdoors, and then having photographs, computers, artificial intelligence, neuroscience.
We look at these as just extensions of human creativity.
So not taking over the creative process, but enabling it to go that much further.
And so you had touched on some of those areas like a NeoMaster.
And so bringing back artworks that have been lost for sometimes decades or even centuries in the ability to be able to use artificial intelligence that can see with an x-ray, this ghostly image, And then, as you mentioned, being able to look at the style of the artists using their other works And then being able to recreate that and then adding on additional things like height maps to give it texture and brushstrokes and to be able to put that onto canvas.
It's such an amazing technology. If you think about how many artworks that have been lost the ages, it actually would fill up all the world's museums combined.
And so what Axia Palace is doing with artificial intelligence is just pretty incredible and bringing back these works. with the vision of an AI recreation.
So it's not an exact replica. It's not tracing.
It's not just... you know, copying, it's using the imagination of AI to bring these back to life.
And they're just incredible. Yeah, if you get a chance to take a look at these and you just see the detail that's there, it's just incredible.
So does Morph have a brick and mortar space or is it all in the digital realm?
Yeah, so what we've been doing is doing kind of a hybrid model.
So we're an online gallery. We're a tech startup actually out of Silicon Valley. infused with all the excitement of Hollywood.
But what we've done is actually partnered with galleries around the world.
So we just held a very large AI deep art session, art fair in London in conjunction with a Levenson Gallery.
And so we've been doing more and more of these physical showings in conjunction with the online presence.
And so a lot of digital artists is consumed and acquired online, but in some cases, having the ability to physically see these pieces especially like a NeoMaster where you see the brushstrokes and the style that's there.
It's a really nice opportunity to be able to blend those to physical and digital spaces together.
So in the case of a NeoMaster and the one in particular you were talking about, is there The gosh, I even hesitate to say something like the final work, but is the the art 3D printed onto a canvas?
Am I remembering correctly? It is. And so we actually collaborated directly with the research team out of London.
These are two UCL PhDs. and we looked at where could this technology be printed And so we actually ended up finding a location in Hollywood and this company actually produces these high resolution paintings for film.
So when you blow up a painting in a James Bond movie, It needs to look real on these massive screens.
And so this company had the technology, but it was much more than just creating this because In order for a painting to be recreated, it's a pretty simple process.
You take a digital image, use a 3D scanning technology, put it on a 3D printer, you do that.
But imagine if you just had an x-ray. So how do you bring an x-ray to life?
And so that's where height maps and AI algorithms allow you to bring back brushstrokes into the style of the artist.
And there's some really cool white papers that we could refer to in some of the links.
If any of the listeners are more interested that the team put together on the technology.
What are some of the other ways that digital art is physically displayed, like at the Deep exhibition you mentioned, for instance?
Yeah, so there's lots of different forms of digital art that are emerging.
So Kevin Mac, for example, is using virtual reality and being able to step into these worlds where you're actually interacting with artificial life.
And these characters called lords, have their own language and their own ecosystem and you can interact with them.
Kevin has also produced 3D printed sculptures, which can never be printed or produced, I should say, not just printed. never be produced in any other way, even if with a master trying to hand carve this, it couldn't be produced without these technologies.
And so technology is enabling this new enabling the visions of these so creative artists to really push the boundaries even of what their imagination could allow them to look at.
Imagine an endless possibility, right? And now tapping into the metaverse, right?
It's just is that the possibilities in the space just continue to to explode with new and creative ideas.
Can you explain what an NFT is and why? NFTs are getting so much attention and so much money is being put behind buying and selling and collecting them right now?
Yeah, so an NFT is a non-fungible token.
It's the opportunity to own something that's recorded on the ledger.
The ledger is the blockchain. And a lot of these pieces are acquired using cryptocurrency, but they could be purchased in fiat currencies as well. but it allows somebody to show proof of ownership, which is important in the digital world, because you had mentioned people can right-click and save and store.
So there's one Mona Lisa, but there's millions of different copies and prints out there, but there's only one Mona Lisa.
So NFT allows her to be one of something or small editions of something and gives the opportunity for that person who acquired that. to not only enjoy it, but to be able to resell it at another point in time.
And I think that's been adding a little bit to the mystique and the frenzy of what's happening in the NFT space is that collectability, having the ability to actually be the physical owner, have the bragging rights to have a piece of art that you own, that nobody else does.
Everybody else can look at it, but you're the owner of it.
And I think that's what's been driving this trend going forward.
So it was a convergence of multiple activities at the same time.
So the digital art had kind of come into its own, but the ability to recognize proof of ownership and giving that ownership more than ownership, but giving the artist the ability to sell their art.
And then in the case of Smart contracts, which I don't want to go into too much detail, but gives the ability for an artist to actually receive royalties over time, which is really important.
Oh, interestingly. And it was really difficult to do that.
So in today's world, a successful NFT artist can sell his artwork or her artwork or their artwork multiple times and continue to receive royalties on those artwork sales.
And so the proof of authenticity, as well as the ledger of, let's say, that a particular piece of art changes hands multiple times, That's all tracked in the blockchain.
And so that will be kind of the single source of truth, the record of, yes, this is the authentic one. yes, it has passed from this person to that person to you who are now the current owner, and now we'll create a ledger transaction record of you selling it to me.
And so now here's the proof that I own it and it is the authentic.
Yes. Okay. There's one other thing that I think that's really important in this space and Morph Gallery actually solved a really big problem.
The NFT space only allows file sizes of a certain amount.
The resolution, the fidelity, the ability to have these more complex pieces of art are really difficult to do with NFT.
And so, That's why you see these very short GIFs, you see these very short files, you see these single images that are out there.
But what we've solved with the Art Stick is the ability to have long video, high resolution video, and still have the ability to have that as a proof of ownership that somebody can't just right click store and save.
And so we're enabling limited editions and single editions for much more complex art.
And so if you think about what a lot of the artists are doing, and I'll give you one great example. is Daniel Ambrosie is one of our artists.
He's been featured at NVIDIA's GTC as well for his dreamscapes.
Daniel has the ability with the art stick to enable an experience that you can't get anywhere else where you can use the ArtStix remote to be able to zoom in.
His resolution is much higher than any of today's resolutions of any of the finest screens that are out there.
And so you could actually go in and see these images on the way that the artist had intended, and the Art Stick enables that.
Same thing for the other artists that we're working with, like Steve Mattson's work, You can't really have a 10 minute complex video as part of an NFT to be able to be played because it has to be stored on a ledger.
And the complexity of trying to do that today is physically impossible.
And also the ability to play it back with a resolution and the fidelity that that the artist intended.
So imagine having a small stick that plugs into your television set with your entire art collection, and now you can turn your you know, 85 inch 4K, 8K screen in your home into this high resolution art gallery.
And that's what the Art Stick solves that problem.
Got it. So it's both solving for the authenticity, the sort of transactional nature which artists need to survive. of selling, buying, selling, trading, getting royalties, all that.
But then there's also a technical component that supports the complexity, as you said, of high resolution images, videos, and so on.
Yeah, absolutely. And we think that Artstick is a great solution for that.
And that's why we've had more and more artists inside and outside of Morph Gallery that are very interested in this architecture and for the collectors, somebody that just wants a simple solution.
So we're actually working with Samsung right now in Europe. with a really cool ability to take these 120-inch, 200-inch wall TVs and have incredible artwork showing on them.
And so we just did a really fun thing with a Ferrari at the Berkeley Hotel with Samsung.
And so in showcasing the artwork of this amazing artist, but it also takes advantage of these massive video walls that are available now too.
Right. Our guest today is Scott Birnbaum.
Scott is CEO and co-founder of Morph Gallery.
And as we've been discussing, Morph is a gallery, it's a a hotbed.
It's a hybrid online offline thing. They're doing work across the world with different art galleries and artists and, um, corporate technical partners, if you will, to bring kind of this new emerging and pushing the limits world of digital art further into into our world.
It's fascinating stuff. Scott, we were talking a little bit before we started recording about your background.
So let's jump into that. How did you get involved with AI, I think, is maybe the first place to start.
Yeah, I'm an engineer by background, so I'm a geeky guy, love all that stuff.
And I didn't know that my career was going to put me in the throes of today's AI world.
But back in the 80s, my very first job out of college was with Texas Instruments.
And I worked for the semiconductor group, but I was working with another division called of Texas Instruments, their data systems group that were building these AI workstations.
And at the time they were called expert systems.
And so what an expert system was, was kind of an early foray into the AI world where you were creating these knowledge bases, and inference engines.
So you were trying to collect information from experts.
And I remember one of the examples, which is probably one of the more famous ones in the AI space was with Campbell's soup.
So if you can imagine Campbell's Soup, and this is back in the 80s, there were... bringing these vats of their soup.
So imagine 68,000 cans of soup at a time that were heated 250 degrees.
And they had this expert, somebody had worked for the company for 46 years on soup. sterilization process and he was about to retire.
So these systems could fail and you don't want to throw away 68,000 a Kansas soup or worse yet, send it out to the public where somebody could get sick. he had all these tricks in how to solve problems and using artificial intelligence, they were able to quiz this expert for like where he saw issues, what would he do if he saw that there was a problem?
And all of these were stored onto a floppy disk.
Can you imagine, you know, what even probably most of these listeners don't even know what a floppy disk is.
But this was the earliest kind of great examples of how AI was used.
And now look at what NVIDIA is doing and what the world of AI has been created. creating these digital twins of Earth to solve global warming and to help in medicine. but it's also allowing human creativity to extend even further.
I had no idea that my early career at Texas Instruments in the 80s would take me into the world of digital art, but it's been a really fun ride so far.
I confess the whole time you were talking about the expert system, I kept seeing Andy Warhol's face just with a little smile, you know.
You know what? I never really actually put those together.
But if you think about it, there's probably a lot more to that story when you say that. all those pieces together i like i really like that uh well you know if uh if you take it to one of your artists and an nft is coined um you know maybe i'll come across it someday but um Sounds great.
And so when was Morph launched? So I was with Samsung for more than a decade leading their display business.
And early on in my career, I saw digital artists, this explosive field.
And so I had made very early investments at the company into what is today's frame TV.
So we actually showed the very first piece of art onto a television set, showed it off at the Asian Art Museum with a famous painter, Thomas Kinkade.
We showed off at Art Basel at Art Week Miami, a smart TV, and it was amazing.
Instead of smart like what you would see today with apps, it was SM apostrophe art because we saw cloud being an enabler not just to have one piece of art or one artist's work, but multiple artists to be able to do that.
And I just saw the opportunity to push the ecosystem so much further with these new technologies that are out there. that I left Samsung to found Morph Gallery.
It was actually formed in, the parent company is actually Morph AI Inc., And it has AI in its roots.
And we think there's just so much more potential of of what's happening in the art space for this to grow into a really large opportunity.
So that's a great segue into something we frankly don't have time to really do justice to.
But we referenced the metaverse and the omniverse earlier.
Are we headed for a world and I'll keep it to art to not put you too much on the spot here.
Are we headed for a world where the, oh, I don't want to use the word best describing something subjective like art. but where some of the most or perhaps all of the most engaging experiences and interactions that people have with art are going to be taking place in the digital realm and, you know, eventually or soon enough in this sort of metaverse where that's where we go to experience things.
Well, I think the metaverse just is endless opportunities.
It just experiences, I mean, I always look back in time and going through Epcot and seeing what the world was going to be 20, 30 years in the future.
And we're so far past that. So just imagine five years, 10 years from now, the experiences that you'll be able to have and, you know, being anywhere at any time with anyone and experiencing things in a way and technologies will continue to evolve that will enable this.
So holographic technology, Think about the reality, not just putting on a headset, but to physically see something.
So it's just the possibilities are endless.
And that's why I love the name of our company more, We're going to continue to change and evolve as those technologies are moving forward.
And we'll continue to be at the forefront and stay ahead of those curves as these trends continue to move forward.
For folks who want to actually see some of what we've been talking about, there's the website morf.gallery.org.
Are there other places online you direct them?
I know you sent over some YouTube videos I watched.
I think one of them was maybe on Morph's channel as well.
Yeah, so Morph has a YouTube channel. You can experience some of the art that way.
Going to the website's a great way to do this.
But we do exhibitions all the time. So we just wrapped up a large exhibition in London called Deep. which is a very large AI art fair.
We're actually having discussions with Nvidia right now about combining forces for Deep2 to host it in Silicon Valley.
So stay tuned for more discussions in that area.
But we really think that there is, Some great ways to experience both online as well as in physical space as well.
What you're hearing about today on today's podcast.
So Scott, as we said, there's more ground to cover here.
This is a great introduction sort of primer to the space and all of these things are moving so fast as we go forward.
But are there any kind of final... Final closing thoughts or things we didn't mention that you would like to leave the audience with before you go.
Just kind of a short wrap up is, you know, we talked about Pindar Van Arman and how he's enabled robots to become more creative and how Steve Matson's able to transform canvases into these moving paintings.
How Auxia Palace opened up gateways to resurrect the world's lost art.
Daniel Ambrose has created photographs that could dream and how Kevin Mac is using neuroscience to create these interactive photographs. artificial life experiences.
So if you are an aspiring artist, you're a researcher, you're a technologist, you're a fine art collector, or maybe even a tech startup investor, MorphGalley would love to work with you. just so much opportunity ahead in this space.
And we love being the pioneers to push this forward.
And we love our relationship with NVIDIA.
Many of our artists not only have been featured at NVIDIA's global technology conferences, but they're definitely using artificial intelligence and NVIDIA's tools.
And NVIDIA has been a great sponsor of morph and has worked with us on the deep AI art fair that we just held in London.
And we're talking about doing even more collaborations in the future.
So it was, uh, A pleasure being here. I'm really proud to be part of the podcast series.
I love it. And if anybody wants to learn a little bit more about Morph, feel free to reach me directly or just reach us at www.morph.gallery.
There you go. And I look forward, hopefully something works out.
Silicon Valley is closer for me than London is.
I'd love to get to London. So maybe something works out in the coming year where I can come see some of this stuff in person and do another pod.
Who knows? That sounds great. And thanks again for having me today.
It's been our pleasure. Thank you, Scott.
Thank you. Thank you.
