On this little webpage, you will be able to find plenty of images I generated using VQGAN+CLIP. If you wish to learn more about me and my equipment, you can visit the About page and if you wish to view the various images I have generated, you can view the Images page.
My main website is ancient-greek.net, a website with lots of information on the Ancient Greek language. I highly recommend you check it out if you’re even remotely interested in history.
Hello there! My name is Marvin, I am twenty-odd years old and live in Germany. My particular interests revolve around technology and language — and I am the maintainer of a website dedicated to freely distributing information on the Ancient Greek language called ancient-greek.net —, especially older ones — this applies to both the technology and language aspect. I have always found the somewhat dated things more interesting; they have more of a personality than newer things to do me, for some reason. The latter is also why I like studying ancient languages such as Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek. I don't have any scholarly background, though, and am currently trying to finish my apparenticeship as an IT-Systemelektroniker (IT systems technician) at a company in Bielefeld, Germany. I am also somewhat of a minimalist and I prefer things that are more minimalist and simply functional, rather than something overly bloated when it has no right to be.
Personally, one of the main things I spend my time on in my free-time is learning more about languages and, at present, I am focussing primarily on Attic / Koine Greek. I know a variety of scripts and have learnt a large number of languages over the course of my life; I have not, however, learnt enough of these languages to have an actual conversation and thus, the only languages I can actually speak are German, English and Swedish.
I also enjoy travelling very much, even though I have not visited that many countries or places yet because of lack of money. Besides the language and travelling stuff, I also enjoy trying out new types of coffee, tea, wine, whisky (true whisky is spelt without an e
!) and beer which is often accompanied by me reading a book or just listening to music (Klaus Schulze, Neuronium, Tangerine Dream, Эдуард Артемьев, 冨田 勲 — you get the picture, a lot of perhaps more ambient electronic music — and just a lot of 70s and 80s in general (I especially enjoy Japanese 70s). I also highly enjoy a lot of classical music — Beethoven and Vivaldi being one of my favourites — and I also think a lot of Vapourwave is rather nice.
I also thoroughly enjoy HF radio and do quite a bit of shortwave, medium wave and longwave DXing in my free-time as well and programming is also a thing I enjoy doing from time to time. The majority of my programming projects can be found on my Github page.
The generation of VQGAN+CLIP art unfortunately requires a lot of VRAM (≈ 8 GB for a small image), and seeing as graphics card are currently sold (as of 2022) at a significant markup because of “shortages”, it is not always an easy task to buy the equipment necessary for generating such images. This leads many people to, instead, use various online services, such as Nightcafé Studio. These services, however, charge a fair amount of money, so that the creation of a 400 x 400 image with 1,200 iterations can cost anywhere between $1.20 and $0.60 (depending on the amount of credits bought).
The cost is, of course, totally justified as the generation of such images requires a lot of rather expensive hardware; nevertheless, it is still much cheaper to generate these yourself if you have the equipment necessary (even with energy prices soaring and having reached €0.35 / kWh for me). The generation of twenty 400 x 400 images with 1,200 iterations each, taking into considering the aforementioned current energy prices, costs roughly as much as the generation of one image generated using Nightcafé Studio — but only if their large credit package is bought.
Luckily, I was given a nice HP Z440 workstation with an nVidia Quadro M5000 which has 8 GB of VRAM. This allows me to create small VQGAN+CLIP images and upscale them using an AI upscaler if needed.
I have recently begun creating lots of AI-generated art and decided to create a new website showcasing this art. This website used to house a fair number of things, but as I stopped having the time to actually maintain it and decided to focus on maintaining my main website, I thought it would be a nice idea to have this website be a showcase of my AI-generated art.
