LEO ISIKDOGAN
Computational Artist
Algorithms of Nature
Can we truly capture or imitate the complexities of our environment using relatively simple algorithms? To what extent can we predict the subtle intricacies of the natural world through the lens of mathematics?
"Algorithms of Nature" explores the intricate relationship between the unpredictable beauty of the natural world and the orderly structure of mathematical equations. Through the fusion of creative coding and artificial intelligence, it presents generative landscapes and algorithmic patterns reminiscent of real-life geological formations.
"Algorithms of Nature" is being exhibited from May 18 to Sep 17 2023 in Zindankapi Museum in Bursa, Turkey. Zindankapi (Dungeon Gate) is a 2,500-year-old dungeon transformed into a remarkable municipal museum.
The Cosmos in a Lotus
A digital world blooms, ever-changing and alive. 'The Cosmos in a Lotus' blends art and technology. It makes use of state-of-the-art machine learning and image processing techniques to create a constantly evolving planet, reminiscent of a flower blooming.
Uncanny Hills
Uncanny Hills is an exploration of change. It is a journey into a place where the landscape has been transformed by our own actions and the forces of nature. The title is a play on the term "uncanny valley," which describes the feeling of unease that people experience when they encounter something that is almost, but not quite, human. In the same way, the Uncanny Hills are almost, but not quite, like our own world. They represent a future that is both familiar and strange, a future that is both hope-filled and uncertain, a world that is both beautiful and scary.
Uncanny Hills was exhibited at the Floating Pixels exhibition in Miami on December 1-3, 2022.
A Machine’s Dream of Nature
A Machine's Dream of Nature is a generative artwork that explores the simplicity, complexity, and beauty of nature. Driven by computational aesthetics, the work makes use of linear algebra, geometry, and learning algorithms to create vibrant landscapes. The artwork was designed using code and a custom AI-art model that was trained to create an impression of nature using a limited number of triangles at a time, resulting in a simplified, but expressive, representation of a sophisticated natural world.
SuperRare Features: This Unearthly World
Vellum LA News: Vellum LA Presents: This Unearthly World
The Basilica of Artificial Consciousness
The Basilica of Artificial Consciousness by Leo Isikdogan and Emerson Barrett alludes to the idea of digital baroque as a complex and dynamic network of concepts and relationships. It aspires to trace the future of digital in a way that is deeply rooted in the past, while celebrating a post-digital era where the digital is not a novelty anymore, but a new norm.
Built in a style that can be best described as Digital Baroque and created using a custom-designed AI art model, fine tuned on a collection of Emerson Barrett’s artwork, The Basilica of Artificial Consciousness is both fiction and reality at the same time. Its architecture is composed of a complex array of interconnected shapes and interlocking geometries of light and shadow. It resembles an open scroll with its walls and ceilings fused with the sky. It is a building that moves and changes, a building in perpetual transformation. It is a place where the laws of physics and space no longer apply, where digital is a place we all create and inhabit.
Digital Baroque Collection: Digital Baroque: History Meets Algorithm
Artificial Convergent Evolution
Artificial Convergent Evolution is an artistic visualization of a novel AI-based convergent evolution process that is inspired by convergent evolution in nature. It is a result of an experiment that investigated the aesthetics that emerge when generative models are isolated and then pushed towards each other to converge.
Convergent evolution occurs when unrelated organisms independently develop similar traits due to similar environmental pressures. For example, human and octopus eyes have similar structure and function despite not sharing a common ancestor. Similar environmental conditions can lead to convergence, resulting in similar appearances through different evolutionary paths.
This artwork utilizes a custom-designed AI art model to simulate this process of isolation, branching off, and convergence. Initially trained on a large, generic image dataset, the model's copies are subsequently trained in isolation to specialize on disjoint sets of images. Following divergence, the copies are then pushed together, converging on similar evolutionary paths.
This novel artificial convergent evolution process helped generative models diverge from their original training sets while converging towards similar aesthetics, resulting in visually distinct and aesthetically pleasing images.
Civilizations of an Exoplanet
How do the tangible realities of geology, climate, and natural vegetation govern the seemingly abstract concepts of culture and civilization? Can we extend our understanding of these intricate relationships beyond the bounds of our home planet? How might these natural elements shape the trajectory of human societies on unfamiliar planets?
"Civilizations of an Exoplanet" is an artistic exploration of these questions. The work uses a custom AI art model to create visions of otherworldly landforms and their influence on the growth of civilizations. The combination of creative algorithms and artificial intelligence presents a visual journey into imagined human societies on unfamiliar planets.
Geodiversity of an Exoplanet
This work explores geodiversity in the context of extraterrestrial environments. It is an artistic representation of Earth-like planetary landscapes we may one day encounter on celestial bodies. The work was created using a custom-designed AI art model and creative algorithms.
Geodiversity of an Exoplanet was shown live at the ‘Off the Chain’, an immersive event organized by Flow Blockchain and Dapper Labs during NFT.NYC with music by DJ Guy Gerber.
An Impressionist’s World
It feels natural to associate certain periods in the past with the type of media used to depict the world in that time. In the 1960s, for instance, television was the dominant medium, and we associate that decade with the black-and-white images of the small screen. In the 1800s, however, the majority of imagery was created using paint and canvas. The world neither looked black and white in the early 1900s, nor like impressionist paintings in the late 1800s. But what if it did? What would the world have looked like in the Impressionist era? This artwork depicts the world as perceived by an impressionist. The artwork was created using an AI-art model trained primarily on impressionist paintings by Claude Monet, as well as works of other prominent impressionist and post-impressionist artists, including Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh.
A Machine’s Dream of Food
Very little is known about how the brain encodes the taste of food and creates the sensation of taste. This work is an artistic attempt to visualize an artificial neural network’s perception of food. It’s a machine’s dream of food it can never taste if you will. The artwork was generated using an AI art model that neither eats nor has an internal representation of what ‘taste’ means. Nevertheless, it seems to have good taste!
A Machine’s Dream of America
What do machines dream about at night in American data centers? They dream about American landscapes! This artwork illustrates an AI art model’s dream about a wide variety of landscapes in the United States, including some of the most surreal views of Hawaii, California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Midwest, and New England.
A Machine’s Dream of Seasons
A machine dreams about seasons it can never experience. This artwork was generated by an AI art model that ran on a server in a windowless, air-conditioned data center. Despite not being able to experience seasons, the model was able to generate images that evoked the beauty and emotional impact of the four seasons.
Diamond City
Diamond City is an AI art rendition of a fictional city in the metaverse, constructed on a decentralized network, running on nodes distributed across the galaxy. The artwork was created using a custom-designed AI art model and creative algorithms.
The World's First 8K 360° AI Landscape Painting
This was my first 8K 360 degree AI art video, and it is the first of its kind in the world to the best of my knowledge. The original video is rendered natively in 8K resolution, not upscaled in post-processing. It is powered by the resolution-independent GAN that I developed earlier this year. The model is able to generate images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratios, including cylindrical 360-degree videos. Theoretically, there's no limit to the output resolution although resolutions above 8K require workarounds due to memory limitations. The first owner of the NFT received a version of the work in its original 8K (7680 × 3840) resolution.
Terrestrial Hallucinations
Terrestrial Hallucinations is an experiment to illustrate an AI art model’s imagination of the geological, chemical, and biological processes that made the Earth hospitable to life. It is an artistic exploration of how an AI might imagine the “origin of life” on Earth. The artwork was created using a custom-designed AI art model, tuned to generate images of hills, rocky landscapes, oceans, and flowers.
Starry Flowers on a Kanagawa Night
Starry Flowers on a Kanagawa Night brings together two pieces of art: The Starry Night by van Gogh and The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai. They were made thousands of miles apart yet have strikingly similar visual elements. Perhaps their resemblance was no coincidence. After Japan ended the policy that isolated it from the outside world, Hokusai’s work gained popularity in Europe. Vincent van Gogh himself was a great admirer of Hokusai. This artwork amplifies the visual elements shared between those pieces and sprinkles flowers in between, using a custom AI art model.
Moving Life
What would a still life painting look like if we remove the element of 'stillness' from it? Moving Life is an artistic exploration of this question. The artwork illustrates the artist's imagination of an animated still-life painting. It was generated using a custom AI art model that was fine-tuned on thousands of still life paintings.
Heavenly Lava
Volcanoes and lava are traditionally associated with hell in literature. Italian poet Virgil portrayed Lago d'Averno, a volcanic crater lake near Naples, Italy as the entrance to the underworld in his epic poem Aeneid. This artwork explores the opposite direction and illustrates the artist's imagination of what heavenly lava would look like.
Heartbeats of a Flower
If machines could think, what would they think of plants? Would they see them as inanimate objects or as living beings? “Heartbeats of a Flower” is an artistic rendition of the perception of plants through the eyes of a machine. The artwork was created using a neural network that was tasked with generating images of plants that look vibrant and visually appealing. The images were brought to life by a creative use of algorithms.
This work was minted as part of the 8×8: 8 genesis NFTs by 8 major artists working with AI, code and digital technologies in exclusive partnership with Verisart and SuperRare.
SuperRare Editorial: Interview with Leo Isikdogan: Heartbeats of a Flower