Becoming the Artificial Unconscious

Yves Tanguy – Indefinite Divisibility – 1942

The first step to becoming a computer is to think like a computer. The next step to becoming a computer is to materialize those thoughts, perhaps in the form of pictures. 

The Surrealists did this with our collective unconscious. At a time in history when humans were becoming "modern", they took the dark mess of confusion that was our subconscious and made it visible. They used automatic artmaking, dream recall, and mind games like Exquisite Corpse to hack through our subconscious and bring back precious material to help us understand ourselves and what we were becoming. 

The above image is an example of the unconscious mind made visible by Yves Tanguy from 1942.

Today, we are again becoming new kinds of human. Our minds are merging with the computer algorithms we have created, so they in turn create us, in a never-ending feedback loop of evolution. 

Art has lots of purposes, but I like to think the most important purpose of all is to teach us how to be human. And today, being human has a lot do with being a computer. This is what computer-brains look like on the inside:

BigGAN-generated image by Mario Klingemann - 2019

They're also calling it social media performance art. But I think artists have been doing this for quite a while, under the name generative digital art, or algorithmic art. I just wonder what the Surrealists would say if they could see this stuff.

Post Script:

Melbourne artist and coder Sam Hains created Zero Likes, an AI trained to respond only to those lost and lonely images that miss out on attention.

Dog layers on a bed with a blanket - Sam Hains Zero Likes - 2017

Post Post Script:

First of all, the MIT Press has a journal called Leonardo. Next, here is a nice explanation of the artistic process by neuroscience researchers, written in the online science magazine Medical Express.

"Ultimately, we sought to explain the role of implicit learning processes in artistic cognition, or how the competition between different brain networks can lead to a more effective artistic intuition."

And they found that "weaker" prefrontal circuits, which are related to executive functions, can actually lead to more effective artistic cognition. The researchers refer to this phenomenon as the Andras effect.

"For example, if a photographer can tune down her control functions and access to long-term memories, she can perceive a 'different world'; a world without expectations or past memories," Nemeth said. "We can call this intuitive photography."

Kate Schipper et al. How do competitive neurocognitive processes contribute to artistic cognition? – The Andras-effect, Leonardo (2020). DOI: 10.1162/leon_a_02007

I'm also thinking now about how the chemical promiscuity of olfactory receptors makes mindful, environmental odor exploration (paying attention to smells) a great means to exercise your artistic mind. 

Where's My Thought Translator

Psychedelic Artist Here

Text rules the internet. We know that. (It's why you can't google smells.)

But humans aren't born to read, and if we had the choice, we would much rather talk to things than write to them. This is why speech recognition has become such a big deal.

For a while there, voice rec was in trouble. Kind of like how autocorrect was in trouble, maybe you remember that more.

Then came all these neural nets and backward propagation, and now we have mindbots playing video games better than humans. Machine learning artificial intelligence is on a winning streak these days. But it's funny that with all this talk about biased algorithms, we often fail to recognize one group of people that are consistently being left out, even from the most basic of services offered by our digitally-assisted exocortices.

The people left out are those who are hard of hearing, who cannot see well, or who speak with impediments. Your phone may be great at deciphering your drunk-ass request for a cab at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, but that's because it's been trained on a few happy hour voices just to deal with that particular instance.*

Your phone has not been trained to talk to you after your face underwent reconstructive surgery, messing with your speech. Or when you can't speak at all because you can't hear. The problem is that speech recognition technology hasn't been trained on sign language.

Deep Forest Deep Dream Mandala by Nora Berg

Along comes this gentleman, who basically mixes a Nintendo Wii with an Amazon Alexa to allow anyone using sign language to communicate with their omniscient overlords.

The way he does it is really clever though, as he uses a publicly available neural net to (literally?) teach the network sign language, whereupon he further develops that recognized sign language into text, and then ties it all to a text-to-speech program, which can then finally talk to Alexa.

What I want to know is, how long do I have to get this thing to watch me before it can recognize my thoughts and turn them into words so that I can finally be one with the internet??

Sign-language hack lets Amazon Alexa respond to gestures
July 2018, BBC News

Post Script
The Alcohol Language Corpus (of drunk speech)

Between 2007 and 2009, linguistic researchers from the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Institute of Legal Medicine in Munich in Germany convinced 162 men and women to get drunk [and talk Drunken John into a voice recorder].
-Fast Company

Post Post Script
I'm sure I concur with everyone else who is saying that Alex Grey is the only artist where Deep Dream makes his work look worse! Still, how is it that I can't find more of it online? Also, can't someone train a network on his paintings instead of the corpus they used for Deep Dream?

Alex Grey Meets Deep Dream

Alex Grey As Himself

Post Post Post
Accidental robot-hole. I should know way more about neural style transfers, which came out last year and as an extension of the Deep Dream project.

Style transfer is where you anti(?)train a neural net to overfit for a particular style, and then fit that style onto a new image. It makes way more sense when you see it.

Here, a painting of Napoleon, trained on Raphael's School of Athens:

Meta Napoleon Bonapart, unknown origin

Here, a famous Escher painting trained also on the School of Athens:

Deep Escher in Athens, unknown origin

Neil Degrasse Tyson x Kandinsky

Brad Pitt x Duchamp(?)

Abstract Cat

Here's a place that will do it for you, but they have their own pre-designed style templates (called pastiches) - Deep Art

There's also a few apps that do it, Prisma is one.

And finally, don't forget who started this all:

Abstraction of a Cow, Theo van Doesburg, circa 1900

Abstraction of a Tree, curated from Piet Mondrian, circa 1900

The Beginnings of the Retroactive Acausal Network

torrentless tire wrapping

Private companies know where you've been, thanks to license plate cameras
Marnie Eisenstadt, 2015 Jan 15, syracuse.com
modified article:

...because license plate data starts as a snapshot on a public street, your records are their right.

"The whole notion that there is a privacy concern ... is just not valid," said Brian Shockley, Vigilant's vice president for marketing. "It's not a people. It's a license plate. It's not connected to personal information, at all."

DRN and Vigilant don't connect the data to personal information, Shockley said. That happens when the data leaves DRN's database.

The license plate data is rarely used on its own. It's combined with DMV information that identifies who owns the car. New York made more than $4.3 million selling personal DMV data this year and last, according to state contracts.

Type in one name. Up pops a map of where your car has been spotted over the course of the past three months. Mouse over the location and the map tells you what each place is. A few more mouse clicks show your phone numbers, email addresses, social media accounts and home addresses. Yet another few taps on the keyboard and there is social network work map, showing you, your family members, spouses, friends, acquaintances.

"We have created a groundbreaking new product for your investigative and risk management needs," the company's website reads.

TransUnion's spokesman, David Blumberg, said that only law enforcement or other "credentialed customers" can access reports with the license plate data. The list includes private detectives, lawyers, people who work at mortgage companies, people who work at insurance companies, people who work in risk management and people who work in fraud detection.

While access to driver's license data is restricted by federal law, license plate data is not. Blumberg said that, for now, TransUnion is applying the same restrictions to license plate data voluntarily.

On Intent

The individuals do not have to be rational: the evolutionary process allows the successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. (p173)

If bacteria can play games, so can people and nations. (p174)

The Evolution of Cooperation 
Robert Axelrod, 1984
revised edition w foreword by R. Dawkins, 2006

Knowing Not

“Of the two great transitions in human history – the Neolithic and Industrial, they were unplanned and unconscious.” Those who sowed knew not what they would reap. (p20)

and states further:
“…it is unlikely that the great transformation [from agrarian society] could have been…anything other than both unconscious and individualistic. The transformation was too profound, and too contrary, and indeed offensive to the established patterns of thought and values, to be understood in advance.” By the time it came it was too late. (p170)


-Ernest Gellner
Plough, Sword and Book
U. of Chicago Press
1988