Deep Meditations: Abiogenesis (2018-2020)

2020. Custom software, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders.

Part of the Deep Meditations (2018) series, Deep Meditations: Abiogenesis focuses on the emergence of life, and the evolution of single and multicellular organisms. Created used Deep Learning and artificial neural networks trained on thousands of microscopic images.

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