Ganimals: The Underwater Sea Creatures of Our Computational Dreams

Oceane Boulais1, Matthew Groh2 and Ziv Epstein2, (1)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Laboratory, Cambridge, United States, (2)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Labratory, Cambridge, MA, United States
Abstract:
Meet the Golden Foofa, the Baby Oagen and the Charove. These creatures are ganimals, mystical underwater creatures generated by the imagination of a deep neural network, and fed by cryptocurrency. Here at the Ganimal Conservatory, you can meet a wide range of different ganimals, and help new ones emerge by feeding the flock.

The conservatory functions as a self-regulating entity. Feed the ganimals in their natural habitat with Satoshis (1 Satoshi = 0.00000001 Bitcoin, or $0.0001 USD). Every transaction feeds the newborn inhabitants of the wild ganimal conservatory until they’re ready to swim, garble, crawl, skip or gallop. Every transaction paid to the Ganimal Conservatory Bitcoin wallet will yield a transaction ID that is hashed and stored as part of the generational script for the next ganimal, making every creature unique from its predecessors.

The conservatory is powered by BigGAN, Image Super-Resolution, Open GPT-2, Noun Project and html5up. No animals (real or synthesized) were hurt in the production of this website.

Meet the other Ganimals here: http://ganimals.media.mit.edu/index.html

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