neural net
dreams

Main Gallery
Visual Arts Facility
252 Russell Lane
La Jolla, CA 92093

March 13 - 17, 2023

Related works:
Fulfillment of a Wish
On Exactitude in Science

Neural Net Dreams was a week-long solo exhibition featuring three video installations about artificial intelligence and virtual environments.

A large-scale animated projection, Neural Net Dream of July 23-24, 1895 tells the story of how Sigmund Freud arrived at his theory of the dream as a form of wish fulfillment. In pairing this story with animated imagery from a deep learning text-to-image model, the work suggests that generative AI imagery may also be the “disguised fulfillment of a suppressed, repressed wish.”

The Second Death of the Author explores notions of authorship in an age of artificial intelligence. A two-channel video essay with framed screens, the work combines animated photographs of Roland Barthes with a text collaboratively composed by the artist, large language models, and Barthes’s own writings.

Filmed almost entirely in Google Earth, On Exactitude in Science (grid) is a three-part video installation melding fact and fiction, archive and allegory into a speculative documentary about the rise of digital mapmaking. Newly arranged as a single video split across four screens, this latest iteration of the work invited viewers to contemplate the arbitrary borders and grids depicted in the film.