Those of us working in creative fields have often consoled ourselves that although automation may claim many other jobs, at least robots can’t make art. That’s not exactly true for a variety of reasons (depending on how you define ‘art’), but it really goes out the window when you look at these astonishing images released recently by Google. The landscapes produced on the company’s image recognition neural network reveal the answer to the question, “Can artificial intelligence dream?”

It turns out that it can – sort of. Google created a method to ‘teach’ its neural network to identify features like animals, buildings and objects in photographs. The computer highlights the features it recognizes. When that modified image is fed back to the network again and again, it’s repeatedly altered until it produces bizarre mashups that belong in a gallery of surreal art.

Suddenly, an image of a knight on a horse is filled with ghostly impressions of frogs, fish, dogs and flowers. The knight’s arm seems to have sprouted a koala head, while the head of another unrecognizable animal emerges from beneath the horse’s tail. In another image, a tree and field turn cotton candy pink, and the clouds transform into conjoined sheep monsters.

Technically, it’s more like the computers were fed psychedelics and asked to paint, rather than capturing random images that might flash through their artificial ‘minds’ when they’re idle. The computers look for patterns and edges within the photos and paintings when they’re trying to identify objects and shapes, leading to those strange ghostly images scattered randomly throughout. Those edges are brought out more in each successive layer until the network starts thinking it sees all sorts of things within them.

Google describes it as “inceptionism,” saying “We know that after training, each  layer progressively extracts higher and higher-level features of the image, until the final layer essentially makes a decision on what the image shows.”

“So here’s one surprise: neural networks that were trained to discriminate between different kinds of images have quite a bit of the information needed to generate images too. Why is this important? Well, we train networks by simply showing them many examples of what we want them to learn, hoping they extract the essence of the matter at hand (e.g., a fork needs a handle and 2-4 tines), and learn to ignore what doesn’t matter (a fork can be any shape, size, color or orientation).”

“If we choose higher-level layers, which identify more sophisticated features in images, complex features or even whole objects tend to emerge. Again, we just start with an existing image and give it to our neural net. We ask the network: “Whatever you see there, I want more of it!” This creates a feedback loop: if a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.”

Check out lots more examples on Google’s research blog.

Step through the door of an ancient castle in Southern Italy and find yourself transported to an otherworldly, psychedelic scene as the floor flutters and shifts in mesmerizing patterns of color and light. Artist Miguel Chevalier transformed Castel Del Monte, an Italian castle built in 1240, for an interactive digital installation of altered medieval tapestries for a project called ‘Magic Carpets.’

Not only does the light projected onto the floor of the church move with the music in biomorphically-inspired patterns, it reacts to the movements of the visitors as they pass through the space. “This world of colors and shapes in movement takes us, as in a giant kaleidoscope, on an imaginary, poetic voyage,” says Chevalier.

The shapes shift from geometric pixelated patterns taken from traditional Italian mosaic work to lava-like swirls as unsettling music plays in the otherwise darkened space. Seen from the windows in the upper floors of the church, the display is even more dramatic, but the best way to experience the installation is without a doubt to immerse yourself at ground level, enjoying the feeling of the floor seeming to move underneath you.

You might feel like you’re dreaming or even drunk when you wander into these bizarre, surrealist interiors, from a bar that looks like the inside of an alien to a hotel room modeled after TRON. Going beyond mere concepts, these are real, existing spaces with interior design so surreal, avant garde or otherwise unexpected, it’s disorienting.

Conversation Pieces by HEAD Design

The entire room can be a conversation piece, as proven by this unique interior design series by students at ‘HEAD,’ the Geneva University of Art and Design. The designers created an entire apartment with dreamlike rooms including a bedroom that feels like a cloudy white womb, a library entrance that never seems to end, and a dining room that wouldn’t be out of place on the set of the latest Star Trek movie.

H.R. Giger Bar, Switzerland

Few spaces are more surreal than the H.R. Giger Bar in Gruyéres, Switzerland, which takes its cues from the artist’s work. The skeletal motif found within, with giant vertebrae arches, makes it feel like you’re inside some monstrous creature.

HITGallery Hong Kong

The paintings of artist Giorgio de Chirico inspired this surreal black, white and blue shop interior in Hong Kong. Symmetry, a restrained color palette and the scale of the humanoid shelves that take up the center of the store make it feel like stepping into a work of art.

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Disorienting Design 14 Trippy Surreal Interior Spaces

Born on October 22nd, 1920, legendary psychedelic pop culture populist Dr. Timothy Leary would have been 90 years old this year. Leary’s pioneering work on the beneficial effects of psychoactive drugs was swamped by a conservative current of fear and paranoia from above: Richard Nixon famously declared him to be “the most dangerous man in America.” Turn on, tune in, drop out… and check out Timothy Leary in words and art. The doctor is IN!

Tuning In

(images via: Thecant, Britannica.com and The Tribune)

Though he famously exhorted America’s youth to drop out, Timothy Francis Leary himself did anything but. Beginning with a stint as a cadet at West Point in 1940, Leary attended a variety of colleges and universities ending in 1950 with his receiving a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.

(image via: Madame Pickwick Art Blog)

Leary’s education was interrupted by service in World War II, when was a sergeant in the Medical Corps. Not exactly the resume one would expect from a counterculture icon but many facts about Timothy Leary’s life defied easy or logical categorization. On the other hand, Leary was forced to resign from West Point after he was found to have gotten drunk on whiskey and then lied about it, thus breaking the institution’s honor code. Leary later declared that his court-martial was “the only fair trial I’ve had in a court of law”.

(images via: The Daily Beast and Book Soup)

Post-graduation, Leary’s career rapidly progressed. He was an assistant professor at Berkeley from 1950 to 1955, then moved on to become the director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation until 1958.

(image via: This Day In Quotes)

Leary finally found his footing in 1959 at Harvard University, where he lectured in psychology and introduced new treatment concepts revolving around the use of psychoactive substances and compounds, many of which were legal in the early 1960s. Leary soon moved from theoretical discussion to the practical use of psychedelic drugs, which resulted in his being fired by Harvard’s management in 1963.

Turning On

(images via: Motifake and EZZAL)

Let’s take a small step back. In the summer of 1960, Leary journeyed to Mexico and tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Leary later remarked that he “learned more about the brain and its possibilities, and more about psychology, in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology.”

(images via: Dangerous Minds and Telegraph UK)

Upon his return from Mexico, Leary initiated the Harvard Psilocybin Project, a research program intended to analyze and document the effects of synthetic psilocybin on human subjects who ranged from prisoners to seminary students. The most tantalizing results came from The Concord Prison Experiment, which monitored the progress of prisoners treated with psychoactive drugs once they were released back into society.

(images via: Lysergia and Technoccult)

Leary’s subjects received a combination of drug therapy directly supervised by Leary combined with social support modeled after the system used by Alcoholics Anonymous. At that time, the rate of recidivism (return to a criminal lifestyle) among U.S. prisoners was 60 percent. Prisoners who underwent Leary’s therapy recorded a much lower recidivism rate of just 20 percent, declaring that they had received a new understanding of their purpose in life.

(images via: Crucify The Ego, Home in the Holler and Wilson’s Almanac)

One can well imagine how society would have benefited if Leary’s therapy had been instituted as a standard treatment, but alas it was not to be. In 1963 the FDA and DEA began severely restricting the medical and scientific use of psychoactive drugs, regardless of their perceived benefits, and within 5 years possession of even small amounts of psychoactive drugs could (and did) result in the accused doing substantial prison time.

Dropping Out

(images via: Ian C Friedman and 60’s Further)

Booted out of Harvard and deprived of both salary and funding, Leary and his associates were given the use of a mansion in Millbrook, New York, by several heirs to the wealthy Mellon family who encouraged Leary to continue his experiments. “We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s,” said Leary on the Millbrook years. “On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.”

(images via: Step Off and Bruce Eisner’s Vision Thing)

The Millbrook mansion was continually raided by various law enforcement agencies including the local police under the impetus of district attorney G. Gordon Liddy, who later rose to prominence in the Watergate Scandal. A series of raids, arrests and drug busts in the late 1960s saw Leary sentenced to decades in prison – often reduced or thrown out on appeal as Leary and his lawyers would prove several of the laws used to convict him were unconstitutional.

(images via: Netting America, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and SVToday)

The early 1970s saw Leary in exile after escaping from a forestry and gardening detail at a lower security prison. He spent time in Algeria, Switzerland, Austria, Lebanon and Afghanistan before being arrested and flown back to the United States. “If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas,” remarked the judge at Leary’s remand hearing. Sentenced to 95 years, Leary ended up in California’s Folsom Prison – at one point he was locked in the cell next to mass murderer Charles Manson.

Bouncing Back

(images via: YankeePhil, The Edge AM 1400 and CNET News)

In 1976, Leary was released by California Governor Jerry Brown – the same Jerry Brown now running for governor – and in 1982 began a lecture tour with former nemesis (and ex-con) G. Gordon Liddy. The tour was hugely successful and helped bring both Leary and Liddy back into the public eye. The renewed publicity also boosted sales of Leary’s autobiography, Flashbacks.

(images via: Motifake, Wilson’s Almanac and Abraxas 365)

Never a one-trick pony, Timothy Leary refused to be pigeonholed by his reputation. By the 1980s he had embraced the thought of space colonization while rejecting ecologists who, Leary said, were content to remain “in the fouled nest”. He also remained a fervent proponent of recreational drug use though he was firmly against drug abuse. One of favorite snacks was a marijuana bud covered with melted cheese on a cracker.

(image via: Corazonada)

Leary was an early exponent of virtual reality, cyberculture and the Internet, describing the latter as “the LSD of the 1990s” and he set up one of the very first websites – which is still online. He also maintained his strong interest in space exploration and was thrilled by the prospect of having his ashes shot into space. When told that the capsule containing his ashes would eventually fall from orbit and burn up in the atmosphere, Leary was enthusiastic: “Finally, I’ll be a space pioneer, and everyone will know: That will be me. I will be the light.”

Checking Out

(images via: Tau Zero, Answers.com and Lycaeum)

In early 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. Not surprisingly, he embraced his looming death as an experience to be explored and shared. In his remaining months, weeks and days, Leary met with thousands of well-wishers, gave interviews, and renewed old friendships.

(images via: Audiovisualizers, Travelpod and Metroactive)

Some of the best known photographs and images of Leary come from this time of his life, as if the great counterculture guru had decided that life was more about giving than taking. Even as the cancer spread, diminishing his quality of life and causing him to lose weight, Leary remained open to those who sought his guidance or at least, his famously mischievous smile. The black & white photo below was taken by Michael Maloney in San Francisco, where Leary had come to promote an exhibition of LSD blotter paper art

(image via: Michael Maloney Photography)

Leary’s final journey (or at least, the prelude to it) was made into the 1996 documentary film Timothy Leary’s Dead. On May 31st, 1996, as the end quickly approached, Leary arranged for his dying moments to be videotaped for posterity and according to bedside witnesses, his last words were “Beautiful… Beautiful… Why? Why? Why? Why not?!l”

(images via: Kenny Shackleford, SharedMP3.net and Dominoes)

“Timothy Leary’s dead. No, no no no, he’s outside, looking in.” Leary was said to have liked “Legend Of A Mind”, the first song recorded for the Moody Blues’ 1968 album In Search Of The Lost Chord. Released at the height of sixties psychedelia, the song endures as a homage to the man who some say was never born, never died, just visited our planet for a while. We sure could use another visit right about now, wouldn’t you agree? Happy Birthday, good doctor!