Tarot of the Latent Spaces Update

Heart rejoices, angels sing, last GAN is trained today!

For those new in the list, Tarot of the Latent Spaces is a business venture of our fictional startup Hermetechnics Inc. We are initiates of the libertarian-right-hand path (with uninterrupted lineage back to Adam Smith), using magick to create value for our shareholders and disrupting the Crypto Markets by having successfully pumped-and-dumped the Karma™ tokens. As our slogan says: Simony rhymes with Harmony, and your chakras won’t get sheeny unless we help you balance both your kundalini and your bank statement, so baby, let that sweet honey drip to our offshore accounts, and we can show you what does the enlightenment costs! *wink

Jokes aside, you can find out more about the deck, and the reasoning behind the machine learning used to generate it in the previous article. We’ve been on it for almost a year now, and I’m happy to see things coming together! I’ll now show you a few stills from the latent spaces of the trained models. Some are real beauties, delightfully weaving between the Marseille and Rider-Waite classical designs¹.

The 17-Star is definitely my favourite card from the new set of models. Notice how the number of rays in the star varies! Up to your numerological knowledge to analyse.

The fourth horseman seems to have ditched his horse for this model. Not sure if the dark purple spectre or the delicate bones on the rightmost card creep me out more, but the 13-Death captures the archetype incredibly well.

20-Judgement is one of the very few Major Arcana trumps for which the Marseille and Rider-Waite designs substantially overlap. Thus, the result is almost perfectly aligned with the original cards.

The 06-Lovers are slightly troubling me, the model overfits very early. Some of the original lovers’ design contains three persons, some two - interestingly, the model here made almost a clear choice (second to right is the only one I could find with a hint of the third person)

Readings from the Latent Spaces

We had a small installation of the Readings from the Latent Spaces in Haus der Statistik in Berlin a few months ago. Our visitors, one by one, chose a Tarot card and were admitted to the altar space to meditate on its energy with a video generated by a random walk through the latent space of the trained model.

We bounced a couple of videos from the site with a custom soundtrack for the Witch Institute conference earlier this year. I am finally releasing them online on our Instagram this week.

cannot_cross_water

A post shared by Karin (@cannot_cross_water)

Tarot Deck

We are in the process of wrapping things up, designing the flip side and fine-tweaking some of the unruly models. We hope to get the first test prints done this year, each deck as a unique set of cards (we have, for all practical purposes, an infinite² amount of points in the latent space). If you like to secure yourself a copy, please fill in this non-binding form, and we can arrange some under-the-counter trade, friends of friends style. The “commercial” future of this project is still uncertain, as we don’t have too much time to spare on the tedious business side of things. But ey! If I make my first million on this, I’m gonna get me a silk red suit, Florsheim shoes and occupy myself all day by acts of loving mischief to fellow citizens, so let’s see where the universe takes us. ❤️

And a small easter egg at the end, this chunky boy appeared in the latent space of the card 04-Emperor.

Coincidence?

I don’t think so. :)

1. these two decks are generally the template for most artists re-interpreting the decks

2. technically not infinite, but let’s not get all nerdy over discrete representation spaces, ok