Your face

Sammy Gelman

Deep Learning Engineer

Haiku 575

It was late 2021 and the NFT craze was hitting its peak. A friend of mine was living with some crypto-punks down in NoCal and I was getting a bit of an unofficial education about the world of Web3 from him.

We were speaking and the idea about doint an NFT project of our own started to sound pretty appealing. It just so happened that I was sitting on a big art project myself.

I moved to Israel in September of 2014, I was the first in my family to do so and for all intents and purposes I made the move alone. I was living in the Old City of Jerusalem working as a dorm counsoler - it was a way to get in country and have my living expenses covered while I figured out what direction I wanted to move in next. As a sort of a journal, I decided to open a twitter account and post Haiku poetry in it. A simple way to express myself anonomously. Fast forward to today and there are almost 900 poems on the account.

The idea for the art project was to take the poems and feed them through a text-to-image neural network and generate unique art based off of the poem. Since the poems are short, the hope was to be able to write the whole text onto the blockchain along with a pointer to the image. The deal with my friend was that I get access to the twitter API, extract metadata from the poems, and pipe the poems through the image generation software - if I got that all to him, he would take care of the website and the minting.

The old city stone
Inhales the heat of day
Exhaling at night

Well, I held my side of the bargain but unfortunaly, he never delivered. What can you do. I still had fun with the project on my end. I got to learn about GPU processing enviroments, the twitter API and upped my familiarity with Pythons Pandas library.

Here is a link to the Github page for the project which I made public while writing this page.