Alexandra Kaplan-Looking Outwards-02

This is a work by the Generative Art artist Memo Atken called “All watched over by machines of loving grace: Deepdream edition”. It takes a birds-eye image of the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence agency) which is then changed through a deep learning artificial intelligence program called Deepdream. This project caught my eye because it used technology to make a statement on the subject. The algorithm causes the distinct building to look like an infinite number of eyes staring back at you, which is an interesting and insightful comparison considering the purpose of the GCHQ.

I am very unfamiliar with AI and any algorithms/processes one can use to create art within them, so I did some further reading on the subject, and I came across a broken down version of the artistic process in an article Atken wrote:

“At a high level here’s what’s happening in #deepdream:

1. An artificial neural network (i.e. the AI’s ‘brain’) has already been trained on over a million images (to recognise objects in the images)
2. We show the trained network a brand new image
3. While the network is processing this new image, we take a snapshot from a particular group of neurons inside the network
4. We feed that new snapshot image back in, i.e. show it to the network (We can optionally apply small transformations, like zooming in etc.)
5. Repeat”