Looking Outward 02 – Generative Art

In the biography of his website, Memo Aktens writes that his “biggest inspiration is trying to understand the world around me.” Aktens’s unique perspective is reflected in his series “Learning to See”, involving him taking ordinary household objects like towels and cables and generating them into beautiful, lifelike landscapes. Seeing a video of the algorithm in action, it amazes me just how seamlessly it works and the level of abstraction it can produce from a simple arrangement of objects. He seems to be able to take this basic concept and extend it to different mediums, such as running a similar program to transform a video of a dancing saxophonist  into a moving rock formation by the beach. I am not too sure how Akten’s algorithm works, but he mentions that this series works utilizes machine learning and that he trained this model with images of four categories: ocean & waves, clouds & sky, fire, flowers, and images from the Hubble Space Telescope.