Convolutions: Technological Specimens

2023 - present

In the 16th-century European tradition of Kunst- und Wunderkammer (cabinets of art and curiosities), each Convolutions piece presents a collection of scientific specimens: synthetic neurons attuned to visual fragments found across millions of Internet photographs. Each blurred, pixelated pattern represents a distilled technological percept — part of the underlying visual grammar of artificial intelligence, akin to the fundamental motifs encoded by our own visual systems. The artist collects these abstract archetypes from landmark open source neural networks including AlexNet (2012) and Inception v1 (2014), preserving moments in AI history when new models transformed our relationship with technology. Within these contemporary cabinets of curiosity, the machine's rigid, square grid contrasts with the organic forms it learns to recognize. Wooden box frames evoke the traditional specimen cases of natural history collections.