David Young: Dandelions

In their impressionistic simplicity, David Young’s Dandelions capture the world not as he sees it, but as it is seen through the eyes of an artificial intelligence. Through the use of a generative adversarial network (GAN), Young has trained an artificial intelligence to recognize, and to paint, wholly imaginary flowers, by reference to real photographs.

The dandelions which result from this process exist in the hazy, unfocused granularity of the primitive bicameral mind which created them, the process of external recognition, internal generation, and external verification reaching at its apex only a blocky approximation of its real-world reference; but in this approximation can be traced the outlines of an interiority under construction, the fledgling and inaccurate strokes not of an artist in training, but of a dreamer in utero, a glimpse behind the veil of technical abstraction and into the pupal mind of a consciousness aching to be born.

In the blocky outlines and fragmentary tracings of these flowers we find reflected the binding mortar of our own synapses, the visual defects of a consciousness channeled not towards mechanically accurate reproduction, but towards the satisfaction of an internal mandate and the accomplishment of an external goal- the unassuming dreams of a mind not unlike our own.