JOEL SIMON: If you just look at a tree,
or you look at a flower, the forms within it
are so beautiful.
It's really a product of all the forces acting upon it--
how all these things combine together
to get this incredible emergent process of millions
to billions of cells cooperating together to give
rise to a cohesive form.
I was like, how can I capture the essence of that process
by the complexity of the biological systems
and their beauty?
I think that's where computers compliment
the human creative process.
They create a different type of beauty that's hard for humans
to make on their own.
I'm Joel Simon.
I am currently a tool developer and artist.
I think of my work as somewhere between art design
and research.
All of my stuff was motivated by this idea of generative design
tools, where the final result isn't encoded or represented
somewhere.
But there's simple rules going all
the way down to basic physics that interact and give rise
to more and more complicated forms.
The best way to learn about that is through biological systems
that have done this.
Arguably, most of nature is the result of an emergent process.
If we're creating that kind of beauty,
you have to understand the systems that give rise to it.
With the coral project I created this generative growth
algorithm, which is kind of a general purpose 3-D growth
algorithm.
And so it actually uses these biologically motivated
components in a way to grow its own form.
In corals, or polyps--
the colony of polyps--
each one has its own little brain.
And by each one having the same brain
with different local input--
short range signaling, long range signaling, memory, cell
differentiation-- you get a huge diversity
of emergent sophisticated forms that
could have unlimited number of vertices to them.
If I had sculpted them, I think they'd
be less beautiful because the process behind them
would be very different.
For me, I think it captured a lot of I
was seeking out to do with the awe,
the sublime of a generative system.
Coming from the corals, I actually
was thinking a lot about representations
for genetic algorithms.
At the same time, I was interested in GANs.
They are a Generative Adversarial Network.
Basically, they're a set up where you have two networks.
The first one is trying to fool the second with images,
then the second network is trying to discriminate
which images are real or not.
So with GANs.
Every image is basically represented
with a bunch of numbers.
If you average the numbers, they represent two images.
The resulting image will somehow look like the average
of those two images, as well.
And that's a really powerful property because, anything
that can have crossover and mutation,
you can apply genetic algorithm to it.
I was like, oh, someone needs to apply these ideas--
they just belong together--
and no one else is doing it, so I guess I have to.
That was the inspiration for Ganbreeder.
There's three ways of editing an image.
You can either have children-- which are asexual reproduction,
and you get random variants of it.
You have crossbreeding-- where you
can have basically sexual reproduction,
and mix it with another image.
Then the third way, you can tweak the genes of the image
directly, almost like CRISPR.
So a lot of the images are somewhere between real
and, I would say, resemble the real world,
but aren't quite-- in kind of this uncanny aesthetic.
I created this new version now called Artbreeder.
I've trained a bunch of custom models
on portraits, on landscapes, there's one on album art.
And then other users can upload their own models.
I mean, in a sense, I think you are the selective pressure.
You learn how to apply that pressure to guide the system.
I think that's the power of Ganbreeder.
I get to see the system where, like, tens of thousands
of people have created all these things, collaboratively.
It's through that relationship between individuals
and the larger collective that you, I think,
get really powerful systems of emergence.
You know, everyone needs to find inspiration somehow,
and we have our own processes to do that.
I think a lot of designs are inspired
by the results of growth and evolution.
But I think, actually, the process is just
as beautiful as the results because the process gives rise
to some of that beauty that may otherwise
be impossible to comprehend.