UUmwelt (Deep Image Reconstruction), 2018
Pierre Huyghe
Silicone
Edition of 20 + 3APs
Numbered and signed by the artist and comes in own box
25cm x 4cm x 10cm
£5,400 (incl. VAT)
A silicone cast taken from an original 3D print of the visual representation of human thoughts, attempted by a deep neural network, coming from the set of “mental images” shown in UUmwelt at The Serpentine Galleries.
It is an instant of collective production of imagination between two types of intelligences, human and artificial. Human imagination has been externalised without the subject predetermining the outcome, bypassing all modes of expression such as language or the senses, and is visualised using a brain-computer interface.
In UUmwelt, a set of elementary components, building blocks of ideas, were selected for a speculative situation. Among them were biological entities, early prehistoric tools, machine code, artworks. They were given as images or descriptions to be imagined by a subject. As the person imagined these components, the brain activity was captured by an fMRI scanner and a deep neural network then attempted to reconstruct these thoughts, or ‘mental images’.
