What Androids Dream No. 161

Visual Music Series No. 3

It was a boondoggle from the start. Horace the Meech couldn’t get his head around it. He had been playing for the Mugwumps for 3 moog cycles. Everything was going well. His new instrument, the Floofer Board, designed by Garlick Grimbsby, was spreekin’ hot.

The big problem was his Vorkenschpiel. He had spent a small fortune in bitcoin developing it. The Vorkenschpiel was a beautiful idea. The AI at its core was bootstrapped from a scan of an octopus brain. It could morph a tableau from its bionano stock in under 30 garsecs.

The thing about an octopus brain is that it is alien to the way mammals think. Whenever Horace jammed with the Vorkenschpiel, it blew his mind with alien visuals and music. He felt like his head actually exploded in a starburst of widgets and icons. It took weeks for him to come down from the hallucinations. He enjoyed the high, but it would be way too much for an audience. So, back to the drawing board.

Afterwords

This series is a visualization of the not-so-distant future when the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence give mankind complete control of matter. What then? Perhaps art will be our sole occupation.

Notes:

Formatted for 8K UHD screens, the What Androids Dream 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 A sort of homage to Philip K Dick, the series anticipates the coming Singularity when even artists may be superseded by machine superintelligence.

Just as photography inspired the cubists and abstract expressionists, what will art generating, super intelligent machines inspire? Perhaps a collaboration between man and machine to find that perfect image?

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.