LO-02: Generative Art

#Deepdream is blowing my mind.

Memo Akten 

2015.

Memo Akten’s #Deepdream is blowing my mind intrigued me by the way he used this project to reveal our confirmation biases and strong urge to reflect something familiar onto something that is simply “noise with particular distributions.” The combination of art, perception, and machine learning makes this project philosophical yet compelling and interactive. By watching the algorithm produce new combinations of patterns, it pushed me to seek familiarity in the array of colors and designs. Akten uses a video of his face, an unfamiliar image to the machine, which then uses familiar images to generate patterns that it perceives and recognizes in his face. In this way we can see the similarities and differences between machine biases and our human confirmation biases when presented with an unfamiliar image. 

Akten manifests his ideas in the algorithm by revealing the poetry of the algorithm’s processes in comparison to how we as humans perceive and reflect on our world. Akten’s exploration of machine learning and its relationship to human learning allows us to understand different modes of thinking and how the process can be quite similar with different results. 

The deepdream algorithm gives further insight to how we make meaning of the things around us by using the algorithm to show clearly how we engage and understand the images created by it, and how our biological neural network arrives at the conclusions it does. This project uses machine learning to help us better understand our own human learning process and consciousness.