Jennifer I’m Filming You
2010
This video was created using an artificial neural network called a Kohonen Map, which is meant to mimic in software a simplified version of what happens naturally in the human brain.
A video is fed into the neural network, which can be seen on the left side of the screen. Each line can be thought of as an unrolled video frame, in which each row of pixels is laid out end to end. There are eight rows of these pixels, which start off as random grayscale values. As the network watches the video, the row that is the closest match to the current frame slightly adjusts to match it better. It is then output by the network as the video on the right side of the screen. Over time, the network gets better at understanding what it’s seeing, but it must constantly adjust its memory to continue to construct the world.
This is called machine learning, and in some ways can be likened to the biological phenomenon of neural plasticity.
