French art group uses brainwaves and AI to recreate landscapes

Paris: The hypercolour image of a dark hill and lava flow is pretty enough but its high tech artificial intelligence origins make it special. It...

Paris: The hypercolour image of a dark hill and lava flow is pretty enough -- but its high-tech artificial intelligence origins make it special.

It is the product of the brainwaves of one member of French art collective Obvious, collected in an MRI machine at the Brain Institute of the Pitie Salpetriere hospital in Paris.

"I was thinking very hard about a volcano," said Pierre Fautrel, one of the trio.

He admits the resulting work was not exactly what he had in mind, "but it has kept the basic elements: a flaming mountain with flowing lava and a landscape on a light background".

The trio of thirty-somethings, Fautrel, Hugo Caselles-Dupre and Gauthier Vernier, already gained international attention in 2018 by selling an AI-generated artwork at Christie's in New York for more than 400,000 euros.