Perplexing My Eyes

AI trained psychogeography

Critic: Karel Klein
Fall 2021 | Seminar
St. Louis, MO

Louis Aragon, along with Philippe Soupault and Andre Breton, was one of the founders of Surrealism, a literary, philosophical, and artistic movement developed during in the wake of World War I. Set forth in Andre Breton’s 1924 Manifesto, and influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, Surrealism sought to emancipate thought, language, and experience from the constraints of rationalism.

Paris Peasant, written by Louis Aragon in 1926, is considered one of the central works of Surrealism. Not purely a work of automatic writing, the book is a lyrical, literary, and chance reconstruction of Paris—its streets, inhabitants, and its architecture—a surrealist psychogeography.

This seminar used Aragon’s Paris Peasant as a loose guide for how to look at and analogously capture the city of St. Louis. Beginning with StyleGAN scripting, we experimented with the ways in which mis-training, artificial intelligence produces a kind of image-rich “knowledge” that appears more like an AI subconscious than our familiar, everyday reality, ultimately producing our own oneiric reconstructions of St. Louis.

Colab deep learning

Early Prototypes with existed pictures, AI trained GAN seed

Pictures took through time in Forest Park, Dateset Preparation

Stylegan Trained Images

Perplexing My Eyes
(narrative for film)

The trees. They flicker.

For years I walked, and still walk,
through the forest park,
passing winter, spring, summer, and fall—my favorite season.

Several times I became lost
as I chased the trace of the most reddish aspen leaf along the Skinker trail…

So took great pains to familiarize myself with the topography.
It can be abnormally misleading.

I tried to determine why this was the case,
instead of taking pleasure, as I had before,
in wandering wherever my curiosity took me.

I walked, walked, and still walked…

It remained nevertheless to explain
the specific strangeness of these safe havens within the forest.

It occurred to me that, rather than humans,
once could shadow the simulacra that resemble them.

It is the streetlight, as I finally realized.

They vanished without warning,
metamorphosing into the tree branches, growing, budding, merging with the daylight,
perplexing my eyes.

They leaped skyward and clasped wildly to the canopy.

Capacious,
yet enfolding the sunny spot of dappled light,
mimicking my hallucinated daydream.

Do they, I wondered,
when the dusk comes, those patron saints of the forest,
carry the tranquility to the scene before
effusing into the enveloped curtain of the gathering
darkness.