Neural Zoo is an exploration of the ways creativity works: the recombination of known elements into novel ones. These images resemble nature, but an imagined nature that has been rearranged. Our visual cortex recognizes the textures, but the brain is simultaneously aware that those elements don't belong to any arrangement of reality that it has access to. Computer vision and machine learning could offer a bridge between us and a speculative 'natures' that can only be accessed through high levels of parallel computation. Starting from the level of our known reality, we could ultimately be digitizing cognitive processes and utilizing them to feed new inputs into the biological world, which feeds back into a cycle. Routines in an artificial neural networks become a tool for creation, one that allows for new experiences of the familiar. Can art be reduced to the remapping of data absorbed through sensory processes?
