Press kit

Short description

A real neural network runs live inside the work, untrained, fed only by its own slow currents. Everything on the screen is generated from it, by code: the forms lie where its answer falls to zero, the colours show the activity of its hidden neurons, and the bands of light are thoughts crossing them. Each dream is new.

Long description

Latent shows what a machine sees with its eyes closed. Inside the piece runs an actual neural network, small, a few hundred weights in two layers of sine neurons, set by chance and left untrained. Its only input is a slow drift of numbers from inside itself, the way a sleeping mind is fed by its own currents.

The forms are the network’s own: every membrane, shell and fold of coral is the place in space where its answer falls to zero, and a million grains of light condense out of the dark to find it. To find it they ask the network which way is down, and they ask it the way machines learn, by backpropagation, here put to work for dreaming.

The colours are the activity of one hidden neuron; the bands of light that sweep across the forms are the level sets of another. Every minute or two the weights drift toward another mind, and one dream turns slowly into the next. What you see is the dream itself, shown without translation.

Short description

A sheet of thirty thousand cells grows live inside the work, generated by code. A chemistry of two substances runs through it, after Alan Turing’s morphogens, and where it is active the tissue grows and folds into domes, ridges and corals. Each cell is drawn in grains of light, the way a super-resolution microscope draws it. The organism takes new shapes as you watch.

Long description

Morphogen is a living body that grows by its own rules: an alien tissue of about thirty thousand cells, simulated one by one, live, growing under a microscope as you watch. Each cell is a point with a direction, a top and a bottom, like the cells that line our skin. Two cells hold on to each other side by side and push apart one above the other, and from this single rule the cells form a sheet, one cell thick, that bends and folds.

Through the sheet runs a chemistry of two substances, the morphogens that Alan Turing described in 1952, which draw spots, stripes and labyrinths by themselves. Here the pattern also shapes the body: where the chemistry is active, cells grow, divide and narrow at the top, and the sheet rises into domes, ridges and corals that carry the pattern with them. Waves of excitement cross the tissue as bands of light, and the cells crawl toward them.

Each cell is drawn the way a super-resolution microscope draws one, as about a hundred grains of light, through a lens whose shallow focus travels through the body. The two rates of the chemistry drift slowly along a path set by the seed, so the organism turns from one body into another, always new.

Short description

The night side of a distant world, generated live by code. A simulation of a young giant planet’s weather runs inside the work: storms beat in its atmosphere, each burst sends rings of gravity waves across the sky, and three layers of airglow brighten where the waves squeeze the air. Half a million grains of light, carried by the wind, make the image.

Long description

Nightglow shows the weather of a young giant planet, many times the mass of Jupiter, still warm from its birth and glowing faintly with its own heat. The planets of other stars are so far away that even our largest telescopes see each one as a single point of light. Here, one of them comes close, imagined with the physics we know.

Inside the work runs a simulation of the planet’s weather layer at half a million points. Heat rises from deep inside and breaks through as storms that beat in bursts, as thunderstorms do on Earth and on Jupiter. Every burst lifts the layer and lets it fall back, and the layer swings: rings of gravity waves spread from each storm, cross, and bend in the winds that the planet’s turning gathers into jets and vortices.

High above, the thin air glows in three layers, as it does on Earth at night, and it brightens where a wave squeezes it, so the light climbs as each ring spreads. Lightning flashes in the heart of a burst. Half a million grains of light, carried by the wind, build the image, seen from a satellite in orbit through a lens that keeps the middle sharp. The weather is always new.