Neural Networks for Artists

Remember last summer's influx of convolutional neural network art, which took the form of hallucinogenic-like DeepDream images, like the one above? Prompted by a blog post and code release by a team of Google engineers, haunting composite generation--also known as inceptionism, as a nod to the movie-related internet meme "we need to go deeper"--became the poster child for artificial neural networks. In "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style" Leon Gatys, Alexander Ecker and Matthias Bethge describe it as a system that "uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images." Imagine your vacation photos rendered in the style of Pablo Picasso, or Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painted in the style of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. You can see that example directly, in "Machines and Metaphors," a blog post by artist and programmer Gene Kogan.