Category Archives: Day After Tomorrow

Google DeepDream and Amazonian Shamans

Ayahuasca is a psychotropic beverage made by boiling leaves or roots containing DMT, used by Amazonian shamans for hundreds of years, to experience psychedelic spiritual trips that can be powerful, euphoric, terrifying, and transformative.  Artists have attempted to depict the nature of these hallucinations on canvas, which are striking in their consistency, often sharing not only dream-like visual style, but often a similar colour palette.

DeepDream is a computer program created by Google that applies neural network algorithms to image analysis and processing in recursive loops, identifying and enhancing features and patterns in photographs.  In the context of artificial intelligence development, “dreaming” refers to this iterative generation of output from the emulated neurons of a trained neural network.

I am struck by the similarity of these images.