Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes

‘Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes’ is a large-scale video and sound installation; a multi-channel, one-hour abstract film; a monument that celebrates life, nature, the universe and our subjective experience of it. The work invites us on a spiritual journey through slow, meditative, continuously evolving images and sounds, told through the imagination of a deep artificial neural network.

We are invited to acknowledge and appreciate the role we play as humans as part of a complex ecosystem heavily dependent on the balanced co-existence of many components. The work embraces and celebrates the interconnectedness of all human, non-human, living and non-living things across many scales of time and space – from microbes to galaxies.

What does ‘love’ look like? What does ‘faith’ look like? Or ‘ritual’? ‘Worship’? What does ‘God’ look like? Could we teach a machine about these very abstract, subjectively human concepts? As they have no clearly defined, objective visual representations, an artificial neural network is instead trained on ‘our subjective experiences of them,’ specifically, on what the keepers of our collective consciousness think they look like, archived by our ‘new overseers in the cloud.’ Hundreds of thousands of images were ‘scraped’ (i.e. autonomously downloaded by a script) from the photo sharing website Flickr, tagged with these words (and many more) to train the neural network. The images seen in the final work are not the images downloaded but are generated from scratch from the fragments of memories in the depths of the neural network. Sound is generated by another artificial neural network trained on hours of religious and spiritual chants, prayers and rituals from around the world, scraped from YouTube.

Title: Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything in 60 minutes

Medium: Multi-channel video and sound installation

Artist: Memo Akten

Year: 2019

Location: On display at Pedion tou Areos

Glossary: Neural Network, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning