The Endless Collaborative Book: CVPR AI Art Gallery 2024

This interactive artwork, Wushu, 2023, is an endless collaborative book that intends to encourage and archive active participation in Calligraphy while extending its scope as an art form. This piece engages the audience in generating ink strokes and effects from their motion input. Two customized neural networks generate bilingual inscrutable characters from the audience’s engagements through a “Motion Caption” process. Procedural algorithms derived from calligraphy research and “Four Principles” manipulate the generated characters and their layout compositions, responding to the motion data, and automatically “write” them in the Chinese calligraphy genre. This offers the audience an accessible method to interact with the calligraphy, regardless of their previous knowledge of this oriental art. Wushu accumulates participant-generated calligraphy works and serves as a compendium and digital archive that keeps expanding with the audience’s collective participation. The process of creating (“writing”) and appreciating (“reading”) Calligraphy becomes a cyclical process within this infinite “book.” Wushu seeks to stimulate further attention and discussions concerning the visual forms, linguistic meanings, and cultural essence of Chinese characters and Calligraphy.