An actual, if elderly and ailing, Havanese is looking up at me as I work, and an Avedon portrait book is open on my desk. What could be more beguiling than combining the two? Then my laptop stutters and pauses, and there it is, eerily similar to what Richard Avedon would have done if confronted with a Havanese. The stark expression, the white background, the implicit anxiety, the intellectual air, the implacable confrontational exchange with the viewer--one could quibble over details, but it is close enough to count. My Havedon is, of course, an image produced by an artificial-intelligence image generator--DALL-E 2, in this case--and the capacity of such systems to make astonishing images in short order is, by now, part of the fabric of our time, or at least our pastimes.

We are living in a Great Epoche of Experiments. Think about Renaissance or Dadaist movements. But data science, empowered by the current state of the computational periphery, allows us to do something beyond our imagination. Machine learning was the initial start of the new journey into the unknown. Deep (and unsupervised) learning is a step further.

Video games are a unique and sometimes messy mixture of everything from visual arts to music, coding and animation, typically experienced at home over the course of 10 hours or more. This makes them a fascinating subject for design critics and curators, but it also means that they do not adapt well to a museum setting. The soul of games – the thing that gives them their power – is interactivity, the chance to be a participant, rather than an observer. This is the very thing that's taken away when they are placed in a museum, where they can be seen and read about – but not played. Places like Berlin's Computerspielemuseum and exhibitions like the Barbican's Game On have focused on video games' history as a technology: arcade cabinets and old computers give way to sleek-looking modern consoles, as the displayed works progress from lines and dots to pixel sprites to polygonal 3D models to realistic characters in beautifully-rendered worlds.

I've always wondered what these enigmatic objects really are. Do they come from outer space? Are they about to open and unleash a robot army? What strange message do they bring from their impersonal dimension? At last I know, because I have met them.