A meditation on life, nature, the universe and our subjective experience of it. ‘Deep Meditations’ is a deep dive into – and controlled exploration of – the inner world of an artificial neural network trained on everything – literally images labelled ‘everything’, on the photo sharing website Flickr – as well as images labelled with the world, universe, art, life, love, faith, ritual, god and many more. It is intended as both a piece for introspection and self-reflection, as a mirror to ourselves, our own mind and how we make sense of the world; but also as a window into the mind of the machine, as it tries to make sense of its observations in its own computational way.

An artificial neural network looking out onto the world, trying to make sense of what it sees, in context of what it’s seen before. “Learning To See” is an ongoing series of works that use state-of-the-art Machine Learning algorithms as a means of reflecting on ourselves and how we make sense of the world. The picture we see in our conscious mind is not a mirror image of the outside world, but is a reconstruction based on our expectations and prior beliefs. In “Learning To See”, an artificial neural network loosely inspired by our own visual cortex, looks through cameras and tries to make sense of what it sees. Of course it can only see what it already knows. Just like us.