Google’s Artificial Brain Is Pumping Out Trippy—And Pricey—Art

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ON FRIDAY EVENING, inside an old-movie-house-cum-art-gallery at the heart of San Francisco’s Mission district, Google graphics guru Blaise Agüera y Arcas delivered a speech to an audience of about eight hundred geek hipsters.

He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it’s unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. “He was using state-of-the-art technologies,” Agüera y Arcas told his audience.

His point was that we’ve been using technology to create art for centuries—that the present isn’t all that different from the past. It was his way of introducing the gallery’s latest exhibit, in which every work is the product of artificial neural networks—networks of computer hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. Last year, researchers at Google created a new kind of art using neural nets, and this weekend, the tech giant put this machine-generated imagery on display in a two-day exhibit that raised roughly $84,000 for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to the confluence of art and tech.

The night was one of those uniquely hip yet wonderfully geeky Silicon Valley scenes. “Look! There’s Clay Bavor, the head of Google’s suddenly enormous virtual reality project.” “There’s TechCrunch’s Josh Constine!” “And there’s MG Siegler, who used to write for TechCrunch but now, um, goes to neural network art shows. Or, at least, I think that’s him.” But it was also a night to reflect on the rapid and unceasing rise of artificial intelligence. Technology has now reached the point where neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine, but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money.

For Agüera y Arcas, this is just a natural progression—part of the traditional that extends through Han Holbein and back to, well, the first art ever produced. For others, it’s a rather exciting novelty. “This is the first time I’ve seen art that works more like a science project,” said Alexander Lloyd, a regular patron of the Gray Area Foundation, after he spent a few thousand dollars on one piece of neural network art. But Friday’s show was also a reminder that we’re careening towards a new world where machines are more autonomous than they have ever been, where they do even more of the work, where they can transport us to places beyond even our own analog imaginations.

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