Smile Project

Welcome to Smile Project - Smile and Art will Smile Back!

We have the great pleasure to welcome you in our temple of smiles, where you will discover a new kind of painting and art performance. It is a world premiere - the first intelligent painting that recognizes the human smiles, artistic expressions and body movements and responds back, in the language of light and color.

Human and art meet each other with a smile! We have created a unique ensemble, joining man, art and technology, which establishes a cycle of creation, recognition and communication that creates a bridge between the human spirit and intelligence beyond. Smile Project uses deep convolutional networks and state-of-the-art computer vision technology to respond in realtime through light and color to the smiles, emotional expressions and movements of the human viewer, who becomes in this way part of the creative process together with the system itself. Art is seen, recognized and responded to. Then it becomes the artistic mirror of the human, who is always in search of self in the infinite!

Smile Project proposes an original meeting between humans, art and artificial intelligence. It consists of a novel system, an ensemble of five paintings combined with fiber optics and the latest mobile technology, computer vision and deep learning techniques, in order to achieve an artistic human-AI interaction in realtime. The Smile Project ensemble recognizes the human face and smile as well as her body poses and movements and responds back through lights and colors. Thus, a meta-language is created between the human and the AI-art, through which the system mirrors at a semantic level, by color and light, the human artistic expression. The user is thus engaged in the act of creation, such that to each of her next actions an artistic response is received from the AI ensemble of paintings. By focusing on the human smile and generally positive body movements (e.g. opening of the arms), the system encourages the user to express her positive emotions, with an observed therapeutic effect. We believe our concept has the potential to open new doors in the universe of human-computer interaction, in which a more vivid, powerful and positive artistic and aesthetic experience becomes possible.

The proposed Smile Project uses latest computer vision and deep learning techniques for face detection, smile recognition and detection of body pose. These tasks are solved using state of the art deep convolutional networks and a novel algorithm combines their output in order to decide the appropriate response through colors and lights. The computer vision and deep learning algorithms run on a smartphone (Galaxy S10) with a relatively powerful GPU, using OpenCV and TensorFlow Lite libraries. The system is composed of five paintings and the smartphone is hidden behind the central one, with the camera being able to "see" the user. All the processing is done on this central smartphone, which controls 5 WiFi-enabled controllers, one for each painting. The controllers then dictate the intensity of light and color of their corresponding glow fiber optics, which have different combinations of colored LED sources on both ends. All processing and the final system response runs in realtime at 18 fps. The Smile Project is the main theme of the Diploma thesis of the visual artist, Cristina Lazar at the National University of Arts in Bucharest. The engineering and programming part was done by AI researcher and engineer Nicolae Rosia, who graduated from the Military Technical Academy of Bucharest. The project was conceived and coordinated by Marius Leordeanu, Associate Professor at Politehnica University of Bucharest and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy.

The paintings combine in complementary ways the foreground representation of a smile, through abstract geometric figures realized with different techniques (using a brush, stencil, optical fiber or directly by hand) and mediums (spray, oil, acrylic, flashe, charcoal or light), with the background colors and shapes that fill the "space" of expression. Each work creates a new world in which a different abstract entity, with a different personality, is brought to life and "smiles" in response to the viewer's own smile, pose and movement.

In the history of abstract art, it is important to consider the period when the expressionist art was born, the 50s, when artists came up with an artistic response to the times they lived. They moved art into a direction meant to explore other spaces of visual language, going towards the essence of abstract art. Thus, art went beyond form. The value of an expressionist work became the way that work made one feel. In abstract expressionism each artistic piece requires its time for the viewer to enter its visual universe. That universe is a novel "space" created through colors and shapes.

Smile Project brings a new artistic context that puts art and technology together and gives birth to new spaces and emotions. Artificial intelligence becomes itself "empathic" and responds to the user's own expressions and emotions. In the heart of our contemporary world Smile Project proposes as a way to extend art by establishing a deeper relationship between the viewer and the artwork. It involves the viewer in the process of creation by means of an intelligent machine that recognizes the viewer's expressions and then responds back appropriately.

For creating the Smile Project paintings, Cristina Lazar used different techniques that are particular to abstract expressionism such as: throwing the color directly from the containers then adding other layers by using different unconventional tools (e.g. big rotating brushes used in building construction or her own body, fingers and hands) and through less common body and hand movements (e.g. dancing). The entire artistic process was meant to express the idea of a smile, from the colors used, the artistic style and the way in which the paintings were created. The painting process continued even after the optical fibers were added and the AI system was turned on, in order to create a complete artistic and novel aesthetic object, which has all its elements together, in an harmonious way. The ensemble was conceived to have two aesthetic identities: one during the day when the optical fibers lights are less visible and another, during the night, when the participant can experience mostly the drawing created in realtime through the light response of the neural networks.

Who we are

Cristina Lazar's Diploma coordination: Professor Dr. Petru Lucaci http://www.lucaci.ro/

Painting stands: Architect Samuel Bumbu https://samibumbu.com/