Max Ernst Goes to the Beach

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How the German Surrealist, Artificial Intelligence, minimalist chamber music, and the California coast are connected in one video

Think of watching this short film as a meditation. Take the eight or so minutes to focus on nothing else. You know those dark rooms in art museums where they show projections? That would be ideal. I assume most of you don’t have access to a museum right now, so going full-screen and turning up the volume should do the job.

Look at the screen, listen to the music, and keep examining the slowly changing image. While you watch, an artificial neural network will help you hallucinate the creatures hiding in this surreal rocky landscape.

Welcome back. Let’s have a look at the different elements that make up this piece.

The Photograph

On a road trip with friends in May of 2014, we stopped at Pescadero State Beach, just off California State Route 1. Some of the Tafoni rock formations there look like a different planet.

I took some pictures with my Leica, particularly around one boulder that reminded me of a human figure wearing a helmet. I was using a relatively long lens and ended up having to merge multiple photos into one to get a wider field of view. Thanks, Photoshop!

I found that the final picture worked best in black and white and after adjusting the color curves to a fairly uniform dark lighting.

The AI

The field of Artificial Intelligence is still accelerating. Among other things, machines keep getting better and better at “understanding” images using deep neural networks. The researchers driving this progress need to figure out what’s going on inside the network and have developed tools to do so.

DeepDream came out of one such introspection effort. The familiar aesthetic almost feels dated today, but when I made the first version of this video in 2015, Alexander Mordvintsev had just recently published his research into feature visualization. There is an excellent illustrated guide at Distill if you want to learn more and a Colab to try it out yourself.

The photo I took at the beach was the perfect target to experiment with this technique. At first, I played with the parameters and with random noise to create a few different versions.

In the end, I converted my favorite version back to grayscale, which I found more balanced than the somewhat noisy colors.

The neural network exaggerates features within the image that look like something it has seen before. I chose a version that hallucinated faces of dogs, frogs, a kind of snake, a three-legged raccoon, a two-faced boar, and a shadowy creature reminiscent of a giant guinea pig.

The Music

If you’re looking for minimal and repetitive music, you go to Philip Glass. I chose the track “Islands” from the 1982 album “Glassworks.” I particularly like how it matches the meditative arc of the slowly transforming image.

The chamber music piece is composed for two flutes, two soprano saxophones, a tenor saxophone, a bass clarinet, two horns, a viola, a violoncello, and a synthesizer. It’s about seven and a half minutes long, which I used in full to set the timing of the video.

Philip Glass Ensemble, Photo by James Ewing

The Surrealist

When I was standing in the rock landscape at Pescadero, it already evoked associations with the work of Max Ernst, the German Dadaist and Surrealist who lived from 1891 to 1976. The combination with the hidden creatures seen by an artificial intelligence made the connection even stronger.

Max Ernst used the simple frottage technique to let our minds fill in the blanks in his strange landscape paintings almost a century ago. Today, we can use absurdly complex technology and combine the imagination of people and machines to create a 21st-century version of something strikingly similar.

To me, what remains from this tradition is a sense of mystery, inspired by the natural world and the way our animal and artificial minds are trying to make sense of it.