This art was made using Google’s artificial intelligence “Deep Dream” or “Inceptionism” neural networks, tweaked and made accessible through the great web app Dreamscope, and guided by me. Click on each image for full resolution. More info at the bottom.

-Michael

















To make these, I spent some time pushing my photographs through Google’s recently released Deep Dream neural networks (or Inceptionism), via a really cool and powerful web app made by Dreamscope. I, like everyone else was fascinated by the artificial intelligence algorithms that Google had created and trained. The neural networks were developed to perform image recognition for their image search, and through a process of visual feedback, or, having the AI slightly tweak an image to what it thinks it is, over and over, a visual representation of what is going on in the ultra complicated code then emerges (since the code is trained rather than written, much of its massive makeup is unknown to its developers, and this is one way to peer into its brain). The images produced felt to me not only uncannily like a real hallucination, but also, more than any other digital, non-human source, they felt like they contained the stuff of human visual creativity. These images are all (except for the last one, but that one just looked cool) photographs that I took, ran through the networks via the various tweaks of the algorithms that the guys at Dreamscape made, sometimes 3 or 10 times, brought into photoshop and color corrected (All of the non-photographness is created by Deep Dream, except for heavy color tweaking before/after the filters, mixing of various iterations and my selective process), then ran through a few more times, etc. etc. I think one of the keys to making interesting art this way, and the piece of the puzzle that I bring, is of course the photographs, but also being very picky and doing a whole bunch of iterations until I’m satisfied. The process has been really fun and exciting for me, and I expect to make more. I love art that breaks all the rules, and digital art, much less digital art painted by AI and softly guided by a human brain, in my opinion does that.

-Michael Ranger