tAIpestry Playing Cards: An Interview With Riccardo Conturbia

tAIpestry playing cards is an experimental AI-designed deck by Riccardo Conturbia‘s new brand, Velata Playing Cards, born in 2021 from the ashes of his former company: Passione Playing Cards. Their first project: Love is a Smoke Legacy Edition is both a homage to the first Passione deck ever printed and a seed to the future of Velata’s endeavors. Riccardo told Kardify,

Giordano Loddo is my partner in crime in Velata, and our main goal is to produce cool, rich, and practical decks at a reasonable price. Both “Love is A Smoke Legacy” and tAIpestry will soon be sold on a brand-new website we are building together.

Last week, we interviewed Riccardo about the new deck tAIpestry, AI-generated art revolution, and the possibilities with this technology for playing cards.

Tell us about your new deck tAIpestry and what have you been creating with the AI Image generator?
It’s a concept deck, an experiment. We firmly believe in human creativity and want to work with human minds for our decks, but I wanted to try it at least once to create something different from our previous and future projects and unique. I’m not the only one, though; when I started working with MidJourney and Dall-E 2 in September, only a few Kickstarter projects for Tarot decks were available, and when I posted the first images on social media, tAIpestry was the first poker deck designed by A.I. techniques of my knowledge. Recently David Blaine published Singularity with the same base concept, and I believe more will follow.

All of the artwork on tAIpestry, box included, has been created directly by MidJourney and rescaled to enhance the digital resolution through A.I. techniques. The human intervention has been carefully weighted to stay faithful to the original concept: only some framing has been done to the fronts, and the back has been worked to become symmetric and ensure maximum playability.

What were some of the biggest surprises that you’ve seen while working with the technology?
How it’s quirky and picky with text input. For instance, changing the image’s ratio drastically changes the created artwork’s content, leading to unusable content. We had to make a lot of trial and error before finding the proper balance. Also, the concept of symmetry is not fully understood by the A.I., and I believe we’ll see improvements in this area in the future.

Having worked with this technology for a few months, what are some far-out possibilities that this technology might have for playing cards?
I think it is a tremendous tool to create concept art and help designers reach new frontiers for expressing new concepts. I also firmly believe we must be transparent and clearly explain what is produced by humans and what – if any – is produced directly by algorithms. Some concerning issues about the intellectual property must be addressed and solved; I hope this revolutionary technology will enhance the possibilities for everyone and not impoverish the market.

tAIpestry will be printed by WJPC and available now for pre-order here!