Claude Monet used brushes, Jackson Pollock liked a trowel, and Cartier-Bresson toted a Leica. Mario Klingemann makes art using artificial neural networks.

In the past few years this kind of software—loosely inspired by ideas from neuroscience—has enabled computers to rival humans at identifying objects in photos. Klingemann, who has worked part-time as an artist in residence at Google Cultural Institute in Paris since early 2016, is a prominent member of a new school of artists who are turning this technology inside out. He builds art-generating software by feeding photos, video, and line drawings into code borrowed from the cutting edge of machine learning research. Klingemann curates what spews out into collections of hauntingly distorted faces and figures, and abstracts. You can follow his work on a compelling Twitter feed.

“A photographer goes out into the world and frames good spots, I go inside these neural networks, which are like their own multidimensional worlds, and say ‘Tell me how it looks at this coordinate, now how about over here?’” Klingemann says. With tongue in cheek, he describes himself as a “neurographer.”





1 / 8 Chevron Chevron Mario Klingemann

Klingemann’s one big project for Google so far is an interactive online installation launched in November that uses image recognition to find visual connections between any two images in a giant collection covering thousands of years of art history—say a roman sculpture and a Frida Kahlo self-portrait. While working in secret on a sequel to that project at Google, Klingemann has been exploring the potential of neurography in public on his own time. Many of his recent creations were made with a technique trendy among machine learning researchers called generative adversarial networks, which, given the right source material, can teach themselves to fabricate strikingly realistic digital images and audio files.

Some computer science researchers are using the method to fill in missing details in patchy radio telescope images. Others are using it to train systems to process health records without risking real patient data. Klingemann has harnessed it to generate images that combine the styles of 19th century portraits and 21st century selfies, and fabricating impressively realistic footage like this clip of 1960s French chanteuse Francoise Hardy.

Klingemann's work is in turn inspiring other artists. In a Barcelona show called My Artificial Muse earlier this month, artist Albert Barqué-Duran spent three days painting a fresco of an image Klingemann’s software had generated from a stick figure modelled on John Everett’s famous painting Ophelia.