Imaginarium is an ongoing project that explores the Neuro Cellular Automata (NCA) based texture synthesis technique introduced by Alexander Mordvintsev and his colleagues. The idea of using a collection of identical per-pixel learned code to collaboratively create images is itself fascinating and I quickly became obsessed with this NCA technique for artistic creation this Summer.
I reappropriated this powerful NCA-based technique as a means of visualising my imaginations. When I was a kid, I could stare at the print ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa‘ by Hokusai just to enjoy the imagined gigantic waves in my head. The possibility of externalising via visualisation of those mental pictures is a surreal dream come true.
Imaginarium 01 is an NCA synthesized sequence using Hokusai’s print as training data and Imaginarium 02 is based on a found picture.
