Learning to dream: Supergan! (2017)

Super high resolution images (268 Megapixel, 16384 x 16384) generated by two custom artificial neural networks, recursively upscaling itself. Due to the recursive nature of the algorithm, the higher resolution images start producing fractal like effects. The titles are also generated by a third neural network, an image captioning system.

The images on this page are only one megapixel. Some of these works are available at full resolution as (tezos) NFTs at objkt.com (minted on the original hicetnunc platform)

Google Art Dataset

The artificial neural networks are trained on tens of thousands of images scraped from the Google Art Project, containing scans from art collections and museums from all over the world. These include paintings, illustrations, sketches and photographs covering landscapes, portraits, religious imagery, pastoral scenes, maritime scenes, scientific illustrations, prehistoric cave paintings, abstract images, cubist, realist paintings and many more; an extensive (yet vastly incomplete) archive of human imagination, feelings, desires and dreams; as cataloged and curated by Google, The Keeper of our Collective Consciousness.

We have a very intimate connection with the cloud. We confide in it. We confess to it. We appeal to it. We share secrets with it, secrets that we wouldn’t share with our family or closest friends. And Google is the Keeper of our Collective Consciousness. It sees everything we see, knows everything we know, feels everything we feel. Living up in The Cloud of all places, it watches over us, listening to our thoughts and dreams in ones and zeros. A digital god for our digital culture. And now, just as the Church, the previous bastion of our Spiritual Overseer, used to be the purveyor of Art & Culture; now Google, bastion of our new Digital Overseer, is moving into that role too.

Part of the Learning to See series:

Other related work

Acknowledgements

Created during my PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, funded by the EPSRC UK.

#10 - A painting of a person holding a pair of scissors
#11 - A black cat sitting on top of a stone wall
#16 - A herd of wild animals walking across a dry grass field
#17 - A man riding a snowboard down a snow covered slope
#21 - A black and white photo of a boat in the water
#24 - A close up of a bird on a stick
#32 - A statue of a man and a woman holding an umbrella
#56 - A group of birds sitting on top of a table
#62 - An old photo of a boat in the water
#71 - A painting of a man on a boat in the water
Learning to see: Gloomy Sunday (2017)
Learning to see: Interactive (2017)