The hypercolor images of dark hills and lava flows are beautiful enough, but its high-tech artificial intelligence origins make it special.
This is the product of the brainwaves of one of the members of the French art collective Obvious, collected in an MRI machine at the Brain Research Institute at the Piti-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
“I was thinking seriously about volcanoes,” said Pierre Fortell, one of the trio.
He admits that the resulting work was not exactly what he had in mind, “but the basic elements of the fiery mountain with flowing lava and the bright background of the landscape are retained.” Ta.
Fortrel, Hugo Casell-Dupré and Gauthier Vernier, a trio in their 30s, had already attracted international attention in 2018 when they sold an AI-generated artwork at Christie's in New York for more than 400,000 euros.
For our latest project, “Mind to Image,'' we used the open source program MindEye to capture and reconstruct images displayed from brain activity, which we then combined with our own AI programs to create artwork.
They tried two different versions. One was looking at a photograph and trying to simply reproduce it through brain waves obtained with an MRI.
They also attempted to reproduce the images they had invented based on written descriptions.
For each, we repeated this process many times over 10 hours to create a database for the AI.
～Rebuilding the image of “imagination”～
“We've known for about 10 years that we can reconstruct images from the activity in the visual cortex,” says Alizee López-Parcem, a researcher at the Brain Research Institute.
“But it's not an 'imaginary' image. It's a real challenge.”
It took the team hours to categorize the data collected by the MRI, before Obvious fed that data into its own AI program. This gives a certain atmosphere, partly influenced by surrealism.
“Two years ago, I couldn't believe this existed,” said Charles Mellerio, a neuroradiologist who supported the project.
He attributes this to significant advances in the quality of medical images and the sudden emergence of generative AI that can create images from written prompts.
“There's a very real connection between art and science,” Cassel-Dupré said, while the technology “can be very frightening if used in the wrong way.” he admitted.
The results of their project will be exhibited at the Danysz gallery in Paris in October, and the group says they hope to expand the project into sound and video as well.
kf/pel/er/jj
