Neuronal Visions
Romuald Janik
An online version of the exhibition at the Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.
The actual exhibition
was open May 23rd – June 30th 2024.
This exhibition presents images created by neural networks, whose internal connections I have disrupted in various quasi-random ways, thereby altering their “view of the world” to a completely individual one — no longer strictly connected to reality. What we can observe in the images are glimpses of these alternative worlds, half dreamlike, half surreal — which can give the impression of real subjective visions of these novel “neuronal entities”, whence the title of the exhibition.
None of the neural networks had any contact with human-made art or with any kind of departure from reality. Before the disruption, the original neural network was exposed just to a rather mundane, photographic catalogue of the human and natural environment. The novelty of the imagery thus does not arise from anything directly learned from the training data...
In this project, I am fascinated by the fact that the bare material of these images, at a fundamental level still consists of elements from the real world, but stripped of their original meaning — they become reduced just to a level of purely visual ingredients and begin to “live their own lives” in the images. In a sense, these networks perform a kind of deconstruction of reality...
Click on any image to enlarge...
Below is an excerpt from a video presented during the exhibition. The video shows morphing visions of a Buddhist Stupa as a neural network changes dynamically the strengths of its internal neuronal connections...