“The End of the New Beginning” is an immersive VR gallery that interrogates the evolving relationship between human creativity and algorithm‑driven artificial intelligence. Framed by Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” the experience transports users into a two‑chamber exhibition: first, a digital cave where ancient parietal art—and the shadows on its walls—symbolize the origins of human imagination; then into a bright, modern gallery displaying AI‑generated compositions created in collaboration with industry professionals.
Through guided VR navigation, visitors witness the dialectic between belief and knowledge, analog art and machine‑made imagery. In the cave, they confront primal forms and fragmented silhouettes, echoing humanity’s earliest forays into representation. Emerging into the contemporary hall, they encounter vibrant, generative works born from Schoenberg‑inspired atonal soundscapes and interview‑driven visual collages—each piece responding to questions like “How is our definition of the human changing?” and “What would life look like without us?”
By removing gamified endpoints and instead offering open‐ended exploration, “The End of the New Beginning” encourages reflection on authorship, authenticity, and the future of creative practice. Sound design, live performance elements, and an interactive character guide deepen engagement, while the gallery’s layout—from the shadowy cave to the luminous hall—embodies the project’s central thesis: that AI is neither a usurper nor mere tool, but a new partner in an ongoing artistic journey.
Building Process
AI‑Generated Artwork with CLIP‑CLOP
Research Paper by Piotr Mirowski, Dylam Banarse, Mateusz Malinowski, Simon Osindero, Chrisantha Fernando (Deep Mind London).
All of the collages you see were generated with CLIP‑CLOP (Mirowski et al.), run in an open‑source Colab notebook on a TPU runtime for rapid iteration.
The code is avibale here:
https://colab.research.google.com/github/openai/clip/blob/master/notebooks/Interacting_with_CLIP.ipynb
I honed each composition by crafting prompts that blended philosophical keywords (“shadow,” “enlightenment,” “atonal texture”) with visual descriptors, then watched CLIP loss metrics and intermediate renders to tweak learning rates and patch‑placement randomness over 500–1,000 optimization steps per artwork.
Image Generation Process Image Generation Process
Behind each collage lies a custom library of roughly 300 PNG “patches”—archival cave photos I created using scanned artifacts, urban textures, and organic elements—standardized to 512×512 px with transparent backgrounds. I fine‑tuned CLIP‑CLOP’s patch‑placement network for ten epochs on a representative subset of these patches, saving and evaluating multiple checkpoints until I found the sweet spot between coherence and creative abstraction.
Live Installation & Audience Interaction
The gallery transforms into an VR installation: I arrive early to dim the lights, arrange flickering LED candles along the floor, and position the large display screen with its soft‑panel uplights.
Controllers rest on a pedestal beside a headset, inviting each visitor to step in and guide their own journey. As they don the headset and grip the controllers, the virtual world springs to life—first revealing the cave, then seamlessly transporting them into the bright, modern hall of AI‑generated art.
Ambient audio—from dripping water to atonal musical motifs—surrounds them via hidden speakers, heightening the sense of presence. When they emerge, a row of printed miniatures on a nearby shelf offers a tactile recap of the AI collages they’ve just explored.
All of the collages you see were generated with CLIP‑CLOP (Mirowski et al.), run in an open‑source Colab notebook on a TPU runtime for rapid iteration.
The code is avibale here:
https://colab.research.google.com/github/openai/clip/blob/master/notebooks/Interacting_with_CLIP.ipynb
I honed each composition by crafting prompts that blended philosophical keywords (“shadow,” “enlightenment,” “atonal texture”) with visual descriptors, then watched CLIP loss metrics and intermediate renders to tweak learning rates and patch‑placement randomness over 500–1,000 optimization steps per artwork.
Behind each collage lies a custom library of roughly 300 PNG “patches”—archival cave photos I created using scanned artifacts, urban textures, and organic elements—standardized to 512×512 px with transparent backgrounds. I fine‑tuned CLIP‑CLOP’s patch‑placement network for ten epochs on a representative subset of these patches, saving and evaluating multiple checkpoints until I found the sweet spot between coherence and creative abstraction.
Live Installation & Audience Interaction
The gallery transforms into an VR installation: I arrive early to dim the lights, arrange flickering LED candles along the floor, and position the large display screen with its soft‑panel uplights.
Controllers rest on a pedestal beside a headset, inviting each visitor to step in and guide their own journey. As they don the headset and grip the controllers, the virtual world springs to life—first revealing the cave, then seamlessly transporting them into the bright, modern hall of AI‑generated art.
Ambient audio—from dripping water to atonal musical motifs—surrounds them via hidden speakers, heightening the sense of presence. When they emerge, a row of printed miniatures on a nearby shelf offers a tactile recap of the AI collages they’ve just explored.
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