Latent Spacecraft

The paper's name for its method and its interactive object: a traveler or vessel that walks a two-dimensional slice of a GAN's latent vector, generating outputs as it goes, to show that embeddings are "somewhere" and the interior is partially walkable. Deliberately 2-D, not 3-D, to avoid faking experiential spatiality for a space of hundreds of dimensions; it yields "an intuitive and erratic index of the inside," not a representation. Modeled on Greg Lynn reading Eiffel's hidden armature inside the Statue of Liberty: architecture as locating and explaining an interior never meant to be seen. Companion instruments: extreme-value interpolation, layer-averaged feature maps, concatenated outputs, nonce words.