Martian Earth · 火星照耀地球

Martian Earth Generation 2
2019. With night lights of Earth as of 2016.
Cover image: Western Hemisphere of Martian Earth Generation 2.

“When Mars shines on Earth through AI’s imagination...”

With most of its atmosphere lost and its crust oxidized to various shades of red, are these views of Earth a representation of its pristine state or a not-so-favorable future that we'll have to face if we fail to manage the climate change? Or, are the night lights upon the red terrain a blueprint for our Mars development? In Martian Earth, I present artistic renderings of Earth with visual reference to the "red planet"—Mars. The creative process is the reverse of Terra Mars. I have trained an artificial neural network with topographical data and satellite imagery of Mars so that it can learn the relation between them. The trained model was then applied to topographical data of Earth to generate images that resemble satellite imagery of Mars. With recognizable topographical features of Earth and color patterns emblematic of Mars, I hope this AI-powered mental connection can demonstrate the artistic potential of the technology and provoke people's contemplation of our future on an interplanetary level.

The conditional generative adversarial nets (Conditional GAN) model and data examples used in the project. Mars data was used in the training phase, while Earth data was used in the generation phase. The generator was trained to produce color images according to topographical data in hopes of convincing the discriminator which was trained to be knowledgeable about the authenticity of Mars imagery. The two networks were trained in turn so that they can compete and grow together. The datasets consist of global data of Mars and Earth sliced into thousands of tiles. To facilitate training and generation, longitude and latitude data were also used.

Martian Earth Generation 2
2019. With night lights of Earth as of 2016.
Cover image: Eastern Hemisphere of Martian Earth Generation 2.

A Map of Martian Earth Generation 2 2019. — **A Map of *Martian Earth* Generation 2**
2019.

Terra Mars Series

Martian Earth belongs to the Terra Mars series. Projects in the series include:

Notes

Generation: A Terra Mars or Martian Earth generation refers to the results of applying the trained model to the full dataset of Mars or Earth topography, and stitching the output into a global color map. The process usually but not always includes training a new model. The generations are numbered in chronological order.

Exhibitions

Compass—Navigating the Future. May 27, 2019—2024. Ars Electronica Center, Linz.
"Weather the Weather" a SciArt Initiative exhibition at the New York Hall of Science. September 10, 2019—January 10, 2020.
The 5th Art and Science International Exhibition and Symposium. November 2-30, 2019. National Museum of China, Beijing.
SUBMERGE. December 15, 2019—January 30, 2020. Science Gallery Bengaluru.
Shenzhen Bay STArts Festival—the Final Prophet. December 26, 2020—January 26, 2021. MixC Shenzhen Bay.
Art: Key to Conflict Resolution. June 27—July 27, 2022. Municipal Art Gallery, Thessaloniki.
FILE – Electronic Language International Festival. July 13—August 28, 2022. Galeria de Arte do Sesi, São Paulo.
Annihilation. May 19—August 11, 2023. SNAP, Shanghai.

Installation view at Science Gallery Bengaluru.

Publications

Weili Shi. "Terra Mars: When Earth Shines on Mars through AI's Imagination," Leonardo, Volume 52, Issue 4, August 2019.
- Presented at SIGGRAPH 2019 on July 30, 2019 in Los Angeles.

Neural Network Model Reference

P. Isola, et al. "Image-To-Image Translation With Conditional Adversarial Networks," Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2017, 5967–5976.
T. C. Wang, et al. "High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs," Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2018, 8798–8807.

Data Credits

"Blue Marble: Next Generation," (NASA, 2005).
"Blue Marble," (NASA, 2002).
"Mars HRSC MOLA Blended DEM Global 200m v2," (U.S. Geological Survey, 2017).
"Viking Global Color Mosaic (MDIM1 controlled) 925m," (U.S. Geological Survey, 2001).

Asset Credits

Clouds texture: "Blue Marble," (NASA, 2002).
Night lights texture: "Black Marble 2016," (NASA, 2017).
Stars texture: "Deep Star Maps," (NASA, 2012).