Deep Meditations: We are all connected (Studies, 2020)
2020. Custom software, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders.
These are studies for an ongoing series of work. For more information on the series in general please see Deep Meditations (2018).
Deep Meditations is a series of works that exist in various forms, primarily a large-scale video and sound installation; a multi-channel, long-form abstract film; a monument that celebrates life, nature, the universe and our subjective experience of it. The work invites us on a spiritual journey through slow, meditative, continuously evolving images and sounds, told through the imagination of a deep artificial neural network.
We are invited to acknowledge and appreciate the role we play as humans as part of a complex ecosystem heavily dependent on the balanced co-existence of many components. The work embraces and celebrates the interconnectedness of all human, non-human, living and non living things across many scales of time and space – from microbes to galaxies.
“We are all connected. To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” – Carl Sagan
“How can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse, when every fiber of our being is interlaced, even complicit, in the webs of processes that must somehow be engaged and repatterned? Recursively, whether we asked for it or not, the pattern is in our hands.” – Donna Haraway
#08 – Avril 14
Music: Aphex Twin – “Avril 14”.
#10 – Groove is in the heart
Music: Deee-lite – “Groove is in the heart”.
Day 47 in self-isolation.
My saturday night is going swell.
Music has always been my best friend and salvation,
It nourishes my soul & heals every cell,
(My shows are all cancelled, so I’m available to DJ/VJ at your wedding, barmitzvah or other celebration)
Friends, remember, groove *is* in the heart, I hope you’re all doing well!
#07 – Webbed Ecologies
Music: Aphex Twin – “IZ US”.
Thinking about the intricate, entangled webs of life; the webbed ecologies of heterogeneous temporalities and spatialities; the webbed inter-and-intra actions of symbiosis and sympoiesis; the string figures with which we find connections and stories that matter, and craft conditions for flourishing on earth.
“Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for finite flourishing on terra, on earth.” – Donna Haraway
#06 – Plug me in
Music: Add N to X – “Plug me in”.
I’ve been taking some time to get back into physics, and thinking about mathematics as a universal language, a way to plug into the underlying fabric of reality. Will we ever discover the mathematics to explain consciousness, freewill, love?
Plug me in…
#05 – Mad World
Music: “Mad World” Composed by Roland Orzaba / Tears for Fears. Performed by Marius Furche.
#04 – Cowgirl
Music: Underworld – “Cowgirl”
#03
#02
#01
Related Work
- Deep Meditations (2018)
- Deep Meditations: Morphosis (2019)
- Deep Meditations: Abiogenesis (2020)
- Deep Meditations: We are all connected studies (2020)
- Deeper Meditations (2021)
- BigGAN studies (2018)
Acknowledgments
Created during my PhD, funded by the EPSRC.
Visual network is a ProGAN.
Audio network is a custom architecture: Grannma MagNet.
Amongst many people, I’d like to especially thank Nina Miolane and Sylvain Calinon for their contributions and help with Riemannian Geometry – and particularly Miolane et al for geomstats.