Abusing Neural Networks to Enhance the Tyranny of Bland
Berlin developer’s answer to Park Avenue: an eggbox
By their own admission, Google’s artificial neural networks have a strong bias towards pagodas, birds, insects and dogs. The recent net-glut of images which followed the release of the Deep Dream source code, revealed that artificial intelligence will emerge from a hallucinogenic horror-trip of unimaginable ghastliness.
In an act of pedagogic gavage, a stack of unsuspecting software neurons has been force-fed twenty-three-jizzilion cached images from Google’s servers, given a mild sedative, and told to get on with it. If you are to believe psychonaut Terrence McKenna’s claim that human intelligence was given a metaphysical kick in the synapses when we began herding livestock, and consequently developed a culinary interest in psilocybin mushrooms growing in cow dung, this might equip you with a cyber-metaphoric framework for what Google have accomplished with software.
How did I get here? Oh, yeah. I was hoping Google’s algorithms might help us develop some deep insights into bland architecture. You don’t have to herd cattle far through Berlin in order to find some. A walk in the park will suffice. Along Berlin’s answer to 5th Avenue, developers have erected six or seven Polystyrene egg-boxes and sold them as “affordable” living units, or something. The adjacent Gleisdreieck Park – which is fabulous, actually – will forever be blighted by the presence of this crushing insipidity. But Google’s algorithms are already helping me to understand …
The lower balcony is displaying signs of heavily repressed pagoda, or vaulted-dome roof, and some kind of caravan has emerged from the building in the rear: a clear sign of underdeveloped mobility desires and perhaps claustrophobic tendencies.
A row of taxis, morphed hideously together seems to be gathering before the door, and strange anthropomorphic figures congregate in the bushes. Paranoia and escapist fantasies dominate points of entry and exit.
Delusional tendencies and primitivist fantasies expressed by conical, reed-roofing; turkeys blossoming from daylighting cupolas. Onset of delirium. Mushrooms coming on nicely now brothers and sisters.
Full-on multiple-personality disorder; giant, lacy-winged creatures disg0rge from the heavens; roof cracks apart apart apart; six architectural epochs ’smerge with raw egg, spinach, inexplicable shifts in perspective radiance. Nuns. Rubber-coated chrome. Baby.
Sweet Mother of God. Oblivion. Divine
lightning in blu Earth cleft asunder.
The four
duckmen of the apochromats.
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hail the lizards!
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