What Androids Dream 031

The Beautiful Investment: Dreams for Screens

I’ve been doing digital art since the early 1980s but I never had a good venue to show it other than selling prints. The problem with prints is that they lose the vibrant luminescence of the original work.

It’s hard to describe how much more beautiful digital art looks on a large screen Television than it does in print. The only problem is: how do you sell something that is so easily copied and distributed for no cost? The answer is blockchain technology. With blockchain technology, you have irrefutable proof of ownership and an ironclad provenance.

Here’s the scenario: you come home from work. You’re a little bit wound up and stressed from dealing with people and technology all day and you need a break. Rather than turning on your TV and getting involved in more drama, you turn it on and setup a playlist of your art collection. On your stereo you setup a playlist of your favourite jazz — maybe a little Mingus, Joe Pass or Chet Baker.

Slowly, you unwind and get drawn into the imagery, the strange, alien, enchanting worlds of What Androids Dream. In the background you hear a soft, soothing ticking sound.

What is that sound? Why it’s the sound of your art collection slowly increasing in value.

Life just doesn’t get better than this.

Formatted for 8K UHD screens in anticipation of Samsung’s 85” Q900 Series 8K QLED Smart TV.

What Androids Dream Series

This series was created by collaborating with the artificial intelligence at the heart of the DeepDream project. I input some of my completely abstract images to the software to see what patterns the AI would find in them. The results are the series that I call What Androids Dream. A sort of homage to Philip K Dick, the series anticipates the coming Singularity when even artists may be superseded by machine superintelligence.

I find the alien creatures that the AI “finds” to be strangely endearing, like the “hopeful monsters” of the Cambrian explosion — perhaps even an electric sheep or two for Philip K Dick’s android’s private amusement. For me, the images create a mental atmosphere of sci-fi, psychedelic surrealism filled with strange, dreamlike stories.

There seem to be many stories going on in each image — stories that are private and unique to each viewer, stories that are unique to each viewing.