We designed this mural as part of Amazon Music’s Breakthrough Artist series. The campaign has since won a 2023 Design Week Award as well as two OBIE Awards, the OBIE Craft Award for Best Illustration and a Silver OBIE Award in the Billboards category. The OBIE Awards, presented by the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), are “the advertising industry’s oldest and most prestigious honors for creative excellence in out of home advertising design.”

Our concept involved an AI model called a generative adversarial network (GAN) to create elements of the mural’s background scene, discovering worlds that can only exist in the liminal space between real and unreal, rural and urban, human and machine.⁠

The process began by training the model until convergence on impressionist landscapes, meaning that the model could convincingly produce realistic paintings. We then hijacked the learning process by swapping the dataset with ~15,000 images of urban scenes and skylines. This forced the model to learn how to interpolate between the imagined worlds it knew and the real ones we were showing it now. ⁠