This is Tech

I am a big fan of science inspired art, so I was particularly interested in this neural network art project by Phil Stearns. Stearns has created an Artificial Neural Network using electronic components that produce sound and light in response to the stimulus in the sculpture’s environment. The piece is a complex mess of wires and components responding to nearby conversations and changes in lighting. The neurons also respond to each other, meaning that once it gets started, the sculpture converses with itself for a time.

Lately I have been thinking (and posting) a lot about neuroscience. The way neurons respond to each other seems to have a lot of corollaries to computer networks and social networks. For instance, the way stories propagate from one blog to another. Seeing these principles depicted in a tangible work helps one understand the similarities between the neural networks and other networks.

[AANN : install @ Soundwalk 2007]

Description of Project:

AANN is quite possibly the most absurdly meticulous project I’ve dreamed up, worked out, and fully realized. “She” is a strange very geometric looking jumble of electronic components held together by many meticulously formed pieces of various gauge bare bus wire, interconnected by crisscrossing webs of warm colored insulated wire. The overall form resembles something like a cross between a deep-sea rover, a stripped down spaceship, a high energy laser, and a squid. In fact, there is something life-like to the design of the electronics which comprise AANN. Two “ear-like” microphones pick up sounds and “eye-like” photocells detect changes in light, which then trigger a chain reaction of pulses through many organized layers of identical parts. These identical parts are meant to function as biological neurons. Indeed, the overall function of the electronic sculpture is to mimic a small neural cluster. AANN responds to “stimuli” by lighting up a red LED on each of the neurons with as they fire with the final group of neurons actually producing sound from three small speakers located on her rear. Any attempt to make conversation in AANN’s presence – whether it’s about her or not – will be rudely interrupted by an abrupt tone swooping downwards in pitch like a discontented whine. AANN is loud enough that in the right conditions, she will quite literally begin “talking” to herself. Attempts to interrupt her when she’s in one of these vicious cycles of self-call and self-response are futile, as oftentimes she’s the only one who can talk herself out of talking to herself. Though there was a mild degree of intelligence in her design, it can’t be said that AANN herself is intelligent. Consisting of only 45 crude neurons, AANN hardly possesses the necessary gray matter requisite for intelligence as we have come to term it. However, 45 Neurons does allow for some interesting generative and dynamical behavioral patterns which emerge in those wonderful moments when she’s intently listening to herself listen to herself. In the end, anthropomorphizing is the best way to convey the complexity of ideas behind the birthing of such a project, which in the next few paragraphs and through some fun illustrations, I will attempt to retrospectively document and account for.

For an in-depth description of the project, and more information about the artist, visit the STEIM Project Blog.