every minute for half a day of desert landscapes

half a dozen people looking at diffusion local time at 8pm, showing a desert landscape with boulders artfully arranged to intimate the numbers 8 and then a slight space and then 0 and 0

Diffusion Local Time is a functional timepiece that explores surrealism in generative AI. It was on display in the exhibition at Art Hack Day in San Francisco.

In this installation, the underlying technology and the politics remained the same (a Latent Consistency Model ControlNet running locally) and the local computer was upgraded to a high-end desktop computer, for a sub-minute render latency. Because of the higher compute budget, the resolution increased to 1440x810. For a more cohesive visual, the random seed to generate images was set to change every hour, and most of the digits stayed rendered with the same boulders and sky halos from minute to minute. Further, the number of clock faces reduced to only one, the desert night, to avoid large luminance shifts from afternoon cliffs to desert night to desert sunrise.

The reception was widely positive; reactions included enjoying how calming it was (under a thousandth the framerate of other video art), how beautiful the images were, and why there were so many Milky Ways.