Qualia Hallucinations (Neural Network Feedback Video Synthesis)

Qualia Hallucinations is a series of visual works which explore the experiential subjectivity of AI as well as implications of agent autonomy within the creation of AI artworks.

Qualia refers to the philosophical question and limitation of the experience of certain subjective perceptual phenomena, for example the “greenness” of a color, the “amount of happiness” one feels; it is the limit to which we can explain our own subjectivity.

In this series, I subject two or more Neural-Style-Transfer models to a feedback loop in which the artificial agent is faced with it’s own output-as-input. In other words, the agent applies a style, generated on its own, onto a content image, also produced by its own self. It is faced with the question of how can it
“styleize” itself.

The variations in each of these series is dependent on the seed image, which in turn becomes dissolved, as the agent turns to itself and its autonomous decisions in a potential never ending loop of texture synthesis. These pieces are extracts of a potentially endless self-reflecting style-transfer loop.