What Androids Dream No. 165

Visual Music Series No. 6

The Mugwumps were ready. The show was about to start. A glitchey goomi of Beethoven’s Symphony Number 5 in C minor sprang from Gaudi Glitchmeister’s farflesnaffer. A totally abstract tableau of green, gold and orange blossomed into being. It was breathtakingly beautiful.

Mumbles Mackelroy the octopus brained snumpfabumpf was a super genius morphmeister. She could render a tableau in minisecs. Android avatars began to form around the neural nets of the Very Important Patrons in the core of New Toronto the hollowed out asteroid. The giggle humper began transmitting to the solarnet cloud. Fully one percent of the solar system had joined the servers for the show.

Horace the Meech was ecstatic. His Vorkenschpiel was flabbing furious and mettle merkey. The fliptsters feathered it into the muckle buck and zowed the whole audience. Marsupial Madness the lead critic for Fleecebook was meeking murble, which she hardly ever did. The hearts, thumbs up and shares on Fleecebook broke all the records. Bitcoin poured into the Mugwumps wallet. And there was ecstasy coursing through everyone’s arteries.

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 A sort of homage to Philip K Dick, the series anticipates the coming Singularity when even artists may be superseded by machine superintelligence.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