![]() “Deep Dream was never about the aesthetics for me,” says Akten, a fine artist and PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University in London. Yet, to focus just on the finished image, is, in the view of some Deep Dream artists, to miss the point. Most, however, look like dorm-room mandalas, or the kind of digital psychedelia you might expect to find on the cover of a Terrence McKenna book. ![]() ![]() A few pieces, such as the HR Giger-style rendering of a Google Maps image of GCHQ by the Turkish-born artist Memo Akten, are impressive and engaging. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, for the millions of artists still wedded to their easels and brushes, plenty of the works were not very good. Tech-literate artists took note, and once the code was released, many produced their own Deep Dream images, a few of which went on display at the exhibition. The resultant pictures, packed with animal’s faces, intricate towers and swirling, colourful motifs, were exciting and unusual. This in turn will make the network recognise the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.” “If a cloud looks a little bit like a bird,” they explained, “the network will make it look more like a bird. Engineers wanted to see what might happen if, rather than making software to pick out, say, faces or number plates in a photo, they created a program which accentuated and expressed things which weren’t really there. The program arose out of a project looking into visual classification tasks. Developed at Google’s Zurich office in 2014 and released to the wider world last summer, Deep Dream uses artificial neural networks, a style of computing inspired by the brain and nervous systems, to learn to recognise shapes in pictures. One of the intelligent applications Arcas and co were touting was an image manipulation program also called Deep Dream. To reposition those posts would be mistake, in Arcas’ view: “We believe machine intelligence is an innovation that will profoundly affect art.”Īn image created by Google’s Deep Dream. “Faced with a new technical development in art, it’s easier for us to quietly move the goalposts after a suitable period of outrage,” Arcas argued, “re-inscribing what it means for something to be called fine art, what counts as skill or creativity, what is natural and what is artifice, and what it means for us to be privileged as uniquely human.” In an opening address and an accompanying online essay, Blaise Agϋera y Arcas, a Google machine-intelligence developer, likened the artistic use of such programs to photography, or the employment of optical instruments by Renaissance artists – tools which may have had their detractors, yet are now an accepted part of art history. The show, held in a refurbished cinema in the city’s Mission district, displayed a series of manipulated, photographic works created using one of the tech firm’s artificial intelligence programs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |