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● 05/09/2023

American software artist Casey Reas returns to Berlin’s DAM Projects with “Conjured Terrain,” a solo exhibition of new Untitled Film Stills and Compressed Cinema digital video works set to (and driven by) the electroacoustic soundscapes of German artist and composer Jan St. Werner. Building on a body of images ‘conjured’ from feature films fed to generative adversarial networks (GANs) in 2018, Reas revisits—and celebrates—the raw visual grammar of early machine learning experiments from that era.

DAM Projects
● 28/02/2023
“It seems that forcing a neural network to ‘squeeze’ its thinking through a bottleneck of just a few neurons can improve the quality of the output. Why? We don’t really know. It just does.”
– TechScape columnist Alex Hearn, describing an idiosyncrasy of neural network design. Part of a (largely) jargon free ‘glossary of AI acronyms,’ Hearn breaks down the meaning of ubiquitous AI terminology (GAN, LLM, compute, fine tuning, etc.).
The Guardian
● 29/01/2023
“AI images don’t glitch, they gloop. They streak and striate. It’s the result of how these systems seek out images from the fuzzy noise they start with. While noise is an end state of a bad television broadcast, it’s the start state of AI images.”
– Systems design researcher and artist Eryk Salvaggio, on the origins of “blobby” GAN aesthetics (as seen in the “smeary smorgasbord” that is Refik Anadol’s MoMA installation Unsupervised).
Substack
● 16/02/2021
“There is the sense of witnessing a private, secretive, and interior process, yet one contrasted by the vast exterior of open-source images on which it feeds.”
– Critic Forrest Muelrath, on the “disturbing, hallucinatory” scenes on view at Casey Reas and Jan St. Werner’s bitforms gallery exhibition. “Alchemical” builds on Reas’ Compressed Cinema series, in which a carefully trained GAN model reimagines a corpus of feature films. “It’s not quite dream imagery,” writes Muelrath, “more like unconscious thoughts before they can be articulated.”
Art Agenda
● 08/01/2021

American digital artist Casey Reas and German composer Jan St. Werner (of Mouse on Mars fame) get “Alchemical” at New York’s bitforms gallery. The show presents Reas’ experiments with machine learning techniques as image-making instruments in which he mobilized generative adversarial networks (GANs) trained on feature films. On view: a series of haunting Untitled Film Stills (2021) and five Compressed Cinema films that Werner augmented with “sentient” electroacoustic sounds.

bitforms
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