What Androids Dream No. 163

Visual Music Series No. 5

Things were starting to come together. Horace was pleased with the progress since the mawpsey had snarfed the glitchy goomie and feathered the glitcheys into the ensemble.

Now it was time to design the avatars for the Very Important Patrons to beam into. Jerksi Still would work on the formats to transmit the concert to the asteroid belt and Flocksey Mumblegate would work on the formats for the Mother Earth Cloud.

Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails were popular avatars for Earthers, but hawkesberry smackers were in with the vertebrates on Phobos. It didn’t take a yardarme to fleece that out. Big Jarne the orangutan avatar was reserved for Marsupial Madness the lead critic for Fleecebook. If she gave a positive review, the Mugwumps could be the biggest band in the solar system.

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 A sort of homage to Philip K Dick, the series anticipates the coming Singularity when even artists may be superseded by machine superintelligence.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.