La máquina surrealista
The Dream Machine — an interactive surrealist art generator
- Course
- Aesthetics of digital and interactive media, Tecnológico de Monterrey
- Role
- Concept, software, hardware
- Category
- Installation · Software · Hardware
- Date
- May 2018
I wanted to treat Deep Dreaming as a subconscious digital process, analogous to the human one. Both systems take abstractions — perceptions, insights, fragments of what they already know — and recombine them into altered visuals that look random but are always justified by the thoughts underneath.
The machine is a Python application that generates Deep Dream imagery by stitching together images loaded from Zip disks. The disks are the point: physical, obsolete, slightly absurd media as the carrier of a digital dream.
A visitor inserts a disk and the machine dreams with whatever is on it. Different disks produce different subconscious material, and the output is never quite repeatable.
It remains the strangest thing I've built, and the one I'd most like to build again with better hardware.
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