Did you say "Artificial Intelligence"? Better call it the "big lasagna of matrices": even the most modern artificial neural networks are nothing more than countless layers of matrix multiplications, whose coefficients are tuned on endless batches of training data. Nothing very fancy. Nothing very poetical.
And yet.
Out of the great GPU furnace burning petabytes of data, something drips, oozes, crystallizes. Unexpected forms condense in the heat: neural networks whose weights hold the ghostly imprint of our cybernetic memories; "Foundation Models" that weave together beautiful and uncanny patterns; algorithms that can speak, dream, imagine – almost like us.
Intelligent lasagnas? No – Fertile Matrices, already unsettling our ontologies. Not quite sentient, but not so inert anymore, they are non-phylogenetic living beings, contaminating our world. Hybrid creatures, evolving in affective spaces between dream and nightmare, seeding our imaginaries with a simmering primitive soup of forms and fictions.
Fertile Matrices is a project built upon custom AI algorithms derived from DeepDream applied to modern multimodal networks. The videos are the result of a digital struggle: an artificial intelligence tries to make images emerge, while a procedural algorithm constantly distorts them – in a gesture of cooperation as much as confrontation. The audio are uncanny animal and technical sounds. This work questions the links between creation, generation and the roots of our collective unconscious – which AI imitates.
This project exists in different versions: besides the video series, it can be shown as an installation, in which screens are interwoven with cables and infected with 3D-printed fungal corals.
