In late 2019, just before the new year, my first daughter was born. She first experienced the world through the lens of COVID-19 and its restrictions.
In early 2020, many adults faced anxiety and depression. What was the world coming to? What did life look like? Where could we go?
In early 2020, I started taking her on neighborhood walks. Lonely strolls on foggy spring mornings. It was time to bond and let my wife rest. As the days and walks went by, it became something more.
She started pointing up.
A bright pink flower, a tree shaking in the wind, a fluffy cloud overhead. She was pointing and looking up.
I started taking my camera on walks, photographing what my daughter pointed out, and looking up with her. Over months, I built a collection of pictures — flowers, trees, and local fauna.
I took a curated selection to train a model on RunwayML to generate latent walk GANs and early hallucinatory video generation.
The output reminded me to look up — physically, spiritually, emotionally.