Bushwalking

Bushwalking

Amalia Foka

Greece

Bushwalking is a video showcasing the unique landscape of the Gardens of Stone National Park in New South Wales, Australia. The video was generated using a StyleGAN2 model trained on photos taken by Yuri Bolotin, an explorer, bushwalker, and environmentalist. Bolotin's photos were the most suitable data for the project as they depict the area's unique sculptural landforms. In this manner, the model is trained on the bushwalkers' insight and passion into the region's landscape. 

The video attempts to highlight the uniqueness of Gardens of Stone National Park, a pagoda country with incredible biodiversity and geodiversity. The park has a rich political history due to coal mining activities that continue to this day. Gardens of Stone National Park has been included as part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area because of its core values, which include the spectacular wild and rugged landscape, the diversity of natural environments, the presence of threatened or restricted plant and animal species, extensions to the plant communities of neighboring biogeographic regions, and its cultural landscape. 

The video uses a variation of the StyleGAN2 generator to create an infinite landscape by connecting the generated images in a manner similar to a camera translating between two unrelated scenes. The sound was also algorithmically generated using text-to-speech modeling, with text prompts based on the names of various sites in the area from the latest Gardens of Stone Book that were in the captions. 

 

Trailer: Bushwalking

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