Obvious is a French trio of artists and researchers working with artificial intelligence to create art. Inspired by the model of the renaissance workshops, Obvious operates at the crossroads of academic research and art. Their work consists in researching and building artificial intelligence algorithms in the creative field, and producing artistic series of artworks using those tools. Their research laboratory hosted in Sorbonne University and funded by the French National Research Agency is leading research in the fields of image, video and sound generation.

They are known for pioneering AI art as well as NFTs, as we can trace back their first NFTs to 2018, and they are behind the first artwork created using artificial intelligence to go through a major auction house (Christie’s, 2018).

Obvious is carried by its conviction that science and art are deeply interconnected. They participate actively in the current visual revolution. They develop artificial intelligence algorithms and use them to explore new aesthetic and conceptual grounds, inviting the viewers to an oniric journey that transcends the relationship we have as humans towards technology. Their work questions the complex relationship we nurture, both as individuals and as a society, towards technology.

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About Mind-to-Image

After a thorough exploration of the surrealist movement, and the different practices developed at that time, Obvious developed a way to create artworks that combines old surrealist techniques and new technologies to allow for a new type of creation.

The artists first spent hours inside the MRI machine, going through the process of remembering a database of more than a 1000 surrealist portraits and landscapes. Then, they performed an automatic writing exercise, handwriting everything that came to their mind, leaving it to the subconscious flow of thoughts, and scribing dutifully whatever came to mind. Based on these scriptures, they chose extracts that could be represented either by a portrait or a landscape. They ended up with a list of extracts that they could use as instructions for imagining images inside the MRI Machines. After that, they went back to the MRI machines, and started imagining portraits and landscapes representing the automatic writing extracts. Although poetic, the writings provide a way to validate the veracity of the reconstructions made by the algorithms.

Based on the training data retrieved in the memory process, Obvious trained an algorithm to reconstruct images based on brain activation. As a result, the algorithm was able to predict the image imagined by the artist inside the MRI machine. As a way of validating the algorithms worked, Obvious made sure that each time a portrait was imagined, the algorithm indeed reconstructed a portrait, and likewise for landscapes. In addition to this, they were able to verify that the visuals reconstructed corresponded to the initial text instruction - the automatic writing extract.

This groundbreaking creation process is documented in a scientific paper selected to be presented at an Icml workshop, one of the most renowned machine learning conferences. The series “IMAGINE” is composed of a combination of physical and digital works born from this creation technique. The three works presented at Christie’s are the first digital works available from this series, and as such they share a rarity trait which won’t be shared by any other work of the series.