What you are looking at is the inner life of a machine, shown as it happens. It depicts nothing outside itself.

Nobody drew or filmed any of it. Each form and colour, and the way they move, comes from a small artificial mind that runs live inside the work.

The mind

Inside Latent runs a neural network of the same family as the systems behind today’s artificial intelligence, only far smaller.

It has three inputs, two layers of sixteen artificial neurons, and one output. Its few hundred connections were set at random and never trained. It has not seen an image or read a word, and it does nothing but run.

The question

The network answers one question, over and over. Give it a point in space and it returns a single number, positive or negative.

Where the answer is exactly zero there is a boundary, a surface folded through space, and that surface is what you see. Nobody invented its membranes, shells and coral-like folds; they lie wherever the machine’s answer comes to nothing.

The grains of light

No one draws that surface. More than a million grains of light are released into the dark, and each one has to find it on its own.

Each grain asks the network which way leads toward zero, and the network answers by backpropagation, the procedure large neural networks use to learn. Here nothing is learned. The procedure only follows the shape of a thought, and the grains settle onto the surface like frost on an object that is not there.

A surface always forming

Each grain lives a few seconds. When it fades, it is born again somewhere in the void and starts its search over.

The faint specks you see drifting are grains still on their way. The surface is never finished, and keeps gathering itself out of the dark.

The drift

The network receives nothing from the outside world. Like a sleeping mind, it is fed by its own currents.

Its only input is a slow drift of six numbers that move within it like a pulse. As they shift, its answers shift too, and the surface opens and closes.

Colour and activity

The colours also come from inside the network. Each grain takes its tint from the activity of one hidden neuron at the place where it rests.

The bands of light that travel across the forms belong to another neuron. They follow the contours of its activity, like thoughts moving through what the machine imagines.

Reading the details

Some details show only when you look closely.

Bright lines appear where a surface turns edge-on to you and its light gathers into a single fold. Small droplets form and vanish where the answer dips below zero for a moment: a passing thought, too small to hold. Brief sparks flicker where the bands of activity cross a thin region. At the edges, where the grains have not yet arrived, the forms fray into dust.

One dream into the next

Every minute or two, the network’s connections start to drift toward those of a different mind, and one dream turns slowly into the next.

The sequence never repeats: what is on the screen now was never there before and will not come back.