044 Bonsai-Gan / collaboration with Tei Blow / 2020  

  Video documentation on Vimeo  

Collaboration between Blake Marques Carrington & Tei Blow
single-channel video w sound, Raspberry Pi, 4” square screen, custom mount, Bluetooth speaker, deep-cycle marine battery, power inverter, tree

An A.I. learns how to cultivate bonsai. “Bonsai-Gan” is a video created with machine learning tools, with a voiceover giving a narrative counterpoint to the evolving visual forms. The voiceover touches on the history of bonsai, the aestheticized practice of control over nature, and the blurred boundaries between humans, nature, and technology.

For this work a type of artificial intelligence called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was used. In this type of network, two different A.I.’s participate in a feedback loop of creation and critique — hence the term “adversarial”. The first, called the Discriminator, is trained on a database of images. In this case, the artists trained it on a folder of images of bonsai trees. The second A.I., called the Generator, hasn’t been trained on the images. The Generator tries to “draw” images that the Discriminator then thinks are similar to the things it was trained on. Since the Generator has no idea what to draw, it starts out with a random matrix of red, green and blue pixels. The Discriminator critiques the image, and the Generator makes another. This feedback loop of creation and critique is repeated thousands of times, until recognizable images start to form. The Discriminator eventually decides that the images are of the same thing it was trained on. These output images are not photographic in any way… they are products of the creative negotiation between the two A.I.’s.

“Bonsai-gan” was made specifically for the exhibition “Earthly Delights”, staged in Prospect Park in Brooklyn by Good Naked Gallery, curated by Jaqueline Cedar. A small video screen mounted to a Raspberry Pi microcontroller was mounted to a tree, with power provided by a deep-cycle marine battery and 400W power inverter. A bluetooth speaker hung from a branch. The venue of Prospect Park itself offered some conceptual resonance with the topic of bonsai — both are seemingly natural things that are actually heavily designed. Humans are now at a transition point in our relationship with technology. A.I. is designed by us, but is on the cusp of becoming a new kind of nature.

  Tei Blow website  

  Good Naked Gallery