King's College London

Can machines see? Are humans seeing machines? A poetic commentary on human and machine vision, Neuromatic invites viewers to explore, on both a cognitive and sensory level, what it means to see the world. The video, with its haunting soundtrack and poetic voiceover, remediates medical images of eyes and brains taken from the Wellcome Collection, using an AI-driven GAN algorithm.

To make the video, Joanna Zylinska reanimated, with the help of a BigGAN algorithm (available via ArtBreeder), some historical and contemporary images of eyes and brains. The images had been drawn from the Wellcome Collection, which is a UK repository of medical images. The idea behind Neuromatic was to explore perception as a process unfolding between the eye, the brain, and the world—in humans and machines. The video’s title is a coinage of two terms: neuro, referring to the nervous system, and matic, standing for something pertaining to the eye (which is “mati” in Greek), but also sharing the meaning with the -matic suffix (as in automatic, i.e., “willing to perform”). Neuromatic aims to capture this link between the eye and the brain in the visual apparatus. It also invites a reflection on whether vision itself can be understood in machinic terms.