Building Realities

When reality is created by AI –
the boundaries between artificial and “real” reality

5th Semester, October 2021 – February 2022
Prototyping, AI Art, Film
Supervision: Prof. Marcus Kaiser
Building Realities is an experimental exploration of human perception, how it is composed and how it can change in the future with image-generating artificial intelligence. In times of deep fakes, it is important to ask how our ideas of reality can change, which in this project was particularly related to the medium of film.
Therefore, various sociological and socially relevant theories (e.g. Luckmann & Berger: The Construction of Reality) were analyzed in order to understand how individual perceptions of reality come about and what forms they can take.
These considerations were taken up in the form of haptic bricks or puzzle pieces that explain, brick by brick, how individual perceptions of reality are put together.
If these bricks are now put together, a corresponding film is created, which was generated by an AI on the basis of generic vacation shots. The project investigated whether artificial intelligence can generate videos that appear real “without” humans and how it affects our perception when artificial videos appear real.
Vacation videos were therefore used, as videos are most frequently created by many people on vacation.
Try it yourself! Piece by piece the video is changing in it’s clarity, colour intensity and realism. In the beginning, the generated image is still vague, colorless and spongy; in the final video, the AI and the original come together. Just like our image of reality is “built up”.
The original 8:21min (9246 frames) vacation VHS film was thus turned into a new film of 7:47min (5760 frames) in total.  The development stages of the AI were now used to further develop the optical image to match the puzzle stones.
Additionally, I printed some original postcards from the AI generations, so the new vacation film could be gifted and send out.
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Hi, nice to meet you! I'm Felicitas but you can call me Feli. Currently I started my master's in Design & Future Making at Hochschule Pforzheim.

I'm always open to learn new things and I'm thriving in a dynamic, interdisciplinary and motivated environment. Gladly, I was able to experience such environments besides university during my work at the Institute Design & Systeme in Würzburg, as well as working with the Fraunhofer IIS.

I'm fascinated by the synergy between the analog and digital worlds. This fascination drives me, as I firmly believe that digital media can support us even more in our everyday lives and in more sustainable decisions.


I'm always open for a nice chat and to connect! :)