Alex Mordvintsev

The artist.

This field of synthetic blooms emerged from a machine never intended to create art. A simple image classifier, built from countless additions and multiplications and originally trained to distinguish between dog breeds and household objects, revealed an unexpected universe of patterns dormant within its neural pathways. What makes this image remarkable is not its psychedelic beauty, but what it represents: the moment when artificial perception transforms into something resembling imagination, triggered by amplifying just a few numbers until the network begins to dream.

This 2024 work by Alexander Mordvintsev revisits the DeepDream process first developed in 2015, when neural networks began hallucinating patterns—an early revelation of the generative potential that would eventually bloom into today's image synthesis revolution.

Alexander Mordvintsev is a researcher and artist based in Zurich, Switzerland, exploring the artistic capabilities of AI by weaving machine learning, emergent phenomena, computer graphics and vision in his projects. Mordvintsev is best known for creating the DeepDream algorithm in 2015, which sparked a fundamental shift in how we visualize what neural networks "see", inspiring a new wave of artists to experiment with AI. His artworks have been exhibited at international venues such as the Barbican Centre, Gray Area, SIGGRAPH, Kate Vass Galerie and others. Currently working at Google Research, Mordvintsev focuses on designing artificial self-organizing systems and is passionate about discovering the new, often unintended, artistic capabilities of AI.