https://spmohanty.com/project/time-travelling-microscope/

“The origin of this installation dates back to October 2018, when many of us were gathered in Shenzen, China for the Gathering of Open Science Hardware (GOSH), an annual event where many Open Hardware and Open Science enthusiasts huddle together every year to think about the future of Open Hardware for Science. This time, among the many interesting discussions, a few of us inebriated Art lovers started imagining how would have Van Gogh’s paintings looked like if he was as fascinated with the Microscopic world as us. Especially given his psychotic episodes, and how trippy many of the images in the Microscopic world were. It wasnt hard to connect the dots, as Van Gogh’s Starry Night was a text book example for Neural Style Transfer and Fernan already had a reputation for taking beautiful pictures under a Microscope. A few hours of hacking later, we had our first impromptu installation which we enthusiastically exhibited at GOSH the very next day. People loved it !” S. Mohanty.

We continued to collaborate after GOSH, and came up with Neural Style Transfer based reinterpretations of hundreds of pictures taken by Fernan and his team, in the styles of various artists. The first official version of this installation was exhibited at the AI for Good Global Summit 2019, at ITU, Geneva.