Pierre Huyghe Of Ideal, 2019-ongoing

Of Ideal is part of a body of work in which human imagination is visualized through Artificial Intelligence. The viewer sees a sequence of vaguely familiar but not always recognizable images, which is constantly changing. These images are reconstructions generated by a computer trained to generate 'mental images' based on the brain activity of human subjects it learned to read.

The process began with recording the brain activity of human subjects that were given images or descriptions to be imagined. Among the elements given to them were biological entities, prehistoric tools, machine code, and artworks. As the person imagined these components, brain activity was captured by an fMRI scanner (a medical imaging procedure that visualizes not only the organ but its function). Then a deep neural network, that is, an artificial neural network that functions similar to a human brain and can be trained, attempted to reconstruct these thoughts, or 'mental images'.