Learning Nature
2018-2019
Learning Nature proposes an alternative model for machine learning: intimate rather than industrial, beauty-seeking rather than optimized. The work emerges from the artist’s farm in Bovina, NY, where a Generative Adversarial Network was trained exclusively on photographs of flowers captured during a single summer. This deliberate constraint — a handful of images rather than millions — transforms the system’s limitations into a generative framework for exploring how machines construct understanding.
The resulting images document a computational system developing its own visual language for organic forms. Pixelated artifacts evolve into impressionistic interpretations that echo the Hudson River School painters who worked in this same landscape, suggesting unexpected continuities between historical and computational ways of seeing. The machine’s struggle with botanical complexity produces ghostly flowers and ethereal landscapes — forms that exist nowhere in nature yet activate deep visual recognition patterns in human perception.
This process reveals interpretation and misinterpretation as creative forces. Each image captures a moment in an endless process of digital becoming, where the gap between what the system knows and what it attempts to create generates its own aesthetic logic. The work operates as both critique and proposition: against the industrial scale of corporate AI, it offers a model of machine learning oriented toward beauty rather than efficiency, intimacy rather than surveillance, poetic ambiguity rather than classificatory precision.
Nothing that emerges is accurate, but accuracy isn’t the objective. The work asks the machine to develop its own perceptual framework, and invites us to find meaning in that alien yet strangely familiar vision. The work invites reflection on whether technology can evolve beyond optimization toward forms of intelligence that amplify rather than replace human aesthetic perception.
The essay Little AI explores these ideas in depth.
Exhibition Views
Press
Related Work
Cloud Canyon • Winter Woods • Dandelions - AI / machine learning generated images and videos
Little AI - AI / Machine learning sculpture
Darns - Manipulated and stitched AI / machine learning generated images
