Does Ava Dream?

Grant Sheehan

Pataka Art Gallery & Museum
Cnr Norrie & Parumoana Streets, Porirua

12 June – 19 July 2020

Does Ava Dream?

Using sculpture, photography and video, Paremata artist Grant Sheehan explores current AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies to visualise what an AI dream might look like; in this case, Ava’s. (Ava, the heroine in the 2014 sci-fi thriller Ex-Machina, serves here as a metaphor for an AI conscious humanoid).

Sheehan imagines the form Ava’s dreams could take, and what an AI dream might have in common with our understanding of human dreaming. Taking it a step further, he speculates whether the human concept of dreaming could be used to ‘humanise’ AI technologies.

To create his exhibition, Sheehan used photography ‘plug-ins’ based on a current AI system called ANN (Artificial Neural Network Architecture). He took, in part, inspiration for his project from Google’s DeepDream AI programme, which produced a series of bizarre almost psychedelic images—a result of over processing - as well as his knowledge of more recent developments in ANN.