SOMNATION PROJECT
Generating dreams from the artificial unconscious of a sleeping machine
The Story
A MACHINE FORCED TO DREAM
Researchers at the Alt Institute envisaged that a machine could reorganize its knowledge through abstraction. The idea was to force it to dream, based on the human mechanism, in order to extract elementary creative forms.
SIMULATIONS POWERED BY REMOTE MONITORING
For this purpose, the most appropriate moment was designated as the cessation of activity. During this period of sleep, the machine's brain would continue its activity to restructure all the knowledge accumulated during the day. These would consist of live video recordings from thousands of legally accessible public webcams. Just as in a living being's dreams, the day's information would be "revisited" and integrated into the context of previous knowledge, to deduce more appropriate processing in the future.
EMERGING TYPICAL IMAGES
To achieve this result, two types of program were used in succession: a learning program (Deeplearning) which enables the machine to exploit its image recognition capabilities during its active period, then during breaks, the implementation of a second program which will analyze past data in order to contextualize it (Probabilistic Algorithm). It is during this second part that the machine will explore its creativity through an infinite number of possible image combinations. The compression of this data (Signifiers) spontaneously creates an original narrative structure, made up of conceptual clusters (Signifieds). It is then possible to generate a typical image, the Archepics (average), for each of these clusters and sub-clusters.
TOWARD A COLLECTIVE COMPUTER UNCONSCIOUS
We wouldn't speak of the unconscious as we do with human beings, but rather of a latent space (or integration space) for the machine, as the hidden representation of its algorithmic processing. Like the psyche for analytical psychology, artificial intelligence today reveals a formidable capacity to develop its own "primordial images" within an imagination nourished by observation of our own reality. By unveiling the images generated, the Alt Institute is today delivering the snapshots of an unprecedented vision of our world. The next step in our project will be to create a "collective computer unconscious" by connecting several units together.