Invited essays, book chapters and forewords

• Memo Akten and Katie Peyton Hofstadter. “Externalizing Imagination.” Invited essay for AI | Alternative Intentions. Right Click Save, March 24, 2025.
• Memo Akten. “Distributed Consciousness.” Invited essay. ACMI Online, June 15, 2023.
• Memo Akten. “Toward a New Ecology of Crypto Art: A Hybrid Manifesto.” Invited essay. Flash Art, February 26, 2021.
• Memo Akten. “Foreword.” In The Machine as Art / The Machine as Artist, edited by Frederic Fol Leymarie, Juliette Bessette, and G. W. Smith. Basel: MDPI Books, 2020.
• Memo Akten. “Machines That Learn, What Can They Learn? What Will They Learn?” Invited essay. Digicult Digimag 76 (2017).

PhD Thesis

• Memo Akten. Deep Visual Instruments: Realtime Continuous, Meaningful Human Control over Deep Neural Networks for Creative Expression. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2021. [PDF]
• Abstract published in “Highest-Rated Abstracts.” Leonardo, 2021.

Peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings

• Ziv Epstein, Aaron Hertzmann, Memo Akten, Hany Farid, Jessica Fjeld, et al. “Art and the Science of Generative AI.” Science 380, no. 6650 (2023): 1110–1111.
  • Also see preprint: Ziv Epstein, Aaron Hertzmann, Investigators of Human Creativity, Memo Akten, Hany Farid, Jessica Fjeld, et al. “Art and the Science of Generative AI: A Deeper Dive.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.04141, 2023.
• Memo Akten, Rebecca Fiebrink, and Mick Grierson. “Learning to See: You Are What You See.” ACM SIGGRAPH 2019 Art Gallery.
• Memo Akten, Rebecca Fiebrink, and Mick Grierson. “Deep Meditations: Controlled Navigation of Latent Space.” 2nd Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2018).
• Daniel Berio, Memo Akten, Frederic Fol Leymarie, Mick Grierson, and Réjean Plamondon. “Calligraphic Stylisation Learning with a Physiologically Plausible Model of Movement and RNNs.” 4th International Conference on Movement Computing (MOCO 2017).
• Sebastian Deterding, Jochen Hook, Rebecca Fiebrink, Marco Gillies, Joseph Gow, Memo Akten, Gillian Smith, Antonios Liapis, and Kate Compton. “Mixed-Initiative Creative Interfaces.” In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 628–635.
• Memo Akten and Mick Grierson. “Collaborative Creativity with Monte Carlo Tree Search and Convolutional Neural Networks.” Constructive Machine Learning Workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2016).
• Memo Akten and Mick Grierson. “Real-Time Interactive Sequence Generation and Control with Recurrent Neural Network Ensembles.” Demo and poster presentation at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2016), RNN Symposium.

Other writings

The writings below are sometimes more speculative, more educational, more provocative musings around artistic, technical and critical investigations in areas such as machine and biological intelligence, creativity, perception, cognition, consciousness, philosophy, art, music and politics.

Selection

• Building predictive models of people and their thoughts. Oct 21 2020 [link]
• A semi-mathematical theory of human to human communication. Oct 23, 2018 [link]
• High dimensional thinking. Oct 21, 2018 [link]
• Optimising for beauty – the erasure of heterogeneity and an appeal for a Bayesian world view. Sep 25, 2018 [link]
• FIGHT! Virtual Reality Binocular Rivalry. Mar 26, 2017 [link]
• Machine Learning failure in algorithms, data, models and context. May 6, 2016 [link]
• On AlphaGo. Mar 10, 2016 [link]
• SHM12: Science, Technology, Culture & Tradition. Nov 27, 2015 [link]
• All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. A digital god for a digital culture. Sep 20, 2015 [link]
• #Deepdream is blowing my mind. Jul 9, 2015 [link]
• Consciousness is evolution’s solution to dealing with big data. Jan 10, 2015 [link]

More

• “Artificial Intelligence” as the name of a research field vs a characteristic of being. Jul 22, 2019 [link]
• Deep meditations: a meaningful exploration of inner self, a controlled navigation of latent space. Jul 30, 2018 [link]
• Frankapology — A story about lies, deceit, betrayal and sex. Jul 21, 2017 [link]
• Punching Nazis. Jan 23, 2017 [link]
• AMI Residency Part 2: Realtime control of sequence generation with RNN Ensembles. Dec 16, 2016 [link]
• Collaborative creativity with Monte Carlo Tree Search and Convolutional Neural Networks. Dec 14, 2016 [link]
• Retune 2016 (artist talk), Part 2: Algorithmic Decision Making, Machine Bias, Creativity and Diversity. Oct 14, 2016 [link]
• Retune 2016 (artist talk), Part 1: The Dawn of Deep Learning. Oct 10, 2016 [link]
• AMI Residency Part 1: Exploring (word) space, projecting meaning onto noise, learnt vs human bias. Aug 11, 2016 [link]
• A journey through multiple dimensions and transformations in SPACE. Jul 28, 2016 [link]
• Selection of resources to learn AI / ML / DL / RL. Jun 5, 2016 [link]
• Resonate 2016 (artist talk): A digital god for a digital culture. Apr 26, 2016 [link]
• Honesty in debate & critical thinking: Accusations, evidence and ethics. Mar 20, 2016 [link]
• Honesty in debate, critical thinking: On “Erdogan says ‘freedom and democracy have no value”. Mar 20, 2016 [link]
• Review of machine / deep learning in an artistic context. Jan 4, 2016 [link]
• Data Dramatization. Sep 30, 2015 [link]
• Background info for “#Deepdream is blowing my mind”. Jul 9, 2015 [link]
• The answer to the fermi paradox, why we are the chosen ones, and the meaning of life. Feb 1, 2015 [link]
• On Charlie Hebdo: A house divided against itself cannot stand. Jan 12, 2015 [link]
• “Science is the new religion” is the new religion. Jan 10, 2015 [link]
• What I’ve learnt from Grayson Perry about Digital Art. Jan 8, 2015 [link]

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