Scientist and artist Alexander Mordvintsev is the inventor of DeepDream, and known for using algorithmic pareidolia to create deliberately over-processed images. Becoming dream-like hallucinogenic appearances, the artworks are both terrifying and mesmerizing. Here he explains his most recent work 'Deep Neural Networks.'
Installation photo from the Barbican's AI: More than Human exhibition featuring Deep Dream, created by scientist, artist and Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Alexander MordvintsevBarbican Centre
Deep Neutral Network (2019/2019) by Alexander MordvintsevBarbican Centre
"Deep Neural Networks consists of simple and high-level feature detectors which are trained on millions of human-labelled images by back-propagating errors until the network gets the answers right."
"How can a classifier network generate images?"
"Let’s take some input and propagate the activations to some internal layer."
"We can make this layer fire stronger by back-propagating to the input image."
"After a number of iterations, patterns emerge - eventually becoming a dream-like hallucinogenic image."
Alexander Mordvintsev received his Computer Science Master degree from Saint-Petersburg ITMO University, Russia in 2010. He worked on a number of industrial projects focusing on simulation and computer vision tasks. In 2014 he joined Google Zurich. His research interests include interpretability of machine learned models, computer vision and graphics. In 2015 he developed the DeepDream algorithm.
AI: More Than Human is a major exhibition exploring creative and scientific developments in AI, demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives. The exhibition takes place at the Barbican Centre, London from 16 May—26 Aug 2019.
Part of Life Rewired, our 2019 season exploring what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.
