Thought Becomes Cloud
Nebulous Minds
Based on a 3D scanning mission of Buddhist temples in South Korea, two experiments explore the translation of metaphysical light into electronic energy. By training AI on dancheong, the vibrant mandalas of temple architecture, sacred ornament is reimagined as a virtual cosmogram. AI sculpts these images by overlaying cloud patterns. Research and originality are redefined today less as calculation than as navigation within the mind of AI, visualized as point clouds. The cloud becomes the shape of thought. Through the example of AlphaFold, where clouds, crystals, and helices intersect, the book shows how AI encourages a nonlinear understanding of knowledge and creativity.
When AI paints dancheong, Mete Kutlu, 2023. The image emerges from a StyleGAN2 model trained on a dataset of 1,000 photographs of Korean temple paintings collected during photogrammetric scans across the Korean peninsula. To ensure effective training, the dataset was composed of relatively frontal views of beam decorations, maintaining consistent scale and orientation. Lotus motifs, geometric ornaments, and radiating wave patterns formed the visual vocabulary of the training set. After 9,000 training steps, the network began producing stable images. In these synthetic compositions, wooden structures and lattice patterns reappear, while lotus motifs and wave forms dissolve into fluid concentric and growing bubbles.
Dream Pixels
The research concludes with Dream Pixels, an archive for the age of AI. Its interface uses particle simulation to dissolve six years of research into a turbulent timeline of pixels. Structured as a latent space, the interface immerses the user inside the mind of an artificial intelligence while evoking a cosmic journey. Research becomes not an explanation but an exploration, offering a direct experience of knowledge as spatial, nonlinear, and dynamic. The interface functions both as a method of thought and as a poetics of computational perception.
Dream Pixels: a research on the cloud. An online archive for the age of AI, where the cloud becomes not only a place of storage but also an interface and shape of thought. The project explores the cloud as a new cognitive map for post-intelligence, translating research into an immersive digital environment. Designed and developed by Mete Kutlu and Émilien François, 2023, www.dreampixels.cloud.
A galactic journey within the neural net. Dream Pixels invites the viewer into the mind of artificial intelligence, known as the latent space. Each colored point represents a pixel extracted from an experiment, forming a constellation of data and an immersive map of knowledge. In this environment, pixels become portals to discoveries. Designed and developed by Mete Kutlu and Émilien François, 2023, www.dreampixels.cloud.
A Cloud Atlas
To map this journey, I assemble a Cloud Atlas that connects two worlds: the artisanal and the digital. By placing seventeen cloud figures from both the Silk Road and the age of AI, the atlas traces a cosmopolitan history of civilization. In each period, clouds appear through four domains: images, algorithms, cosmology, and architecture. The artisanal tradition culminates in the symbolic form of the curly cloud, while the digital age leads toward the hypothesis of atmospheric thought. The cosmological imagination of premodern cultures thus anticipated key structures of contemporary computation. The atlas constructs an alternative genealogy of the cloud, revealing how the conceptual architecture underlying our most advanced machines already resonates in the arts and literature of Herat, Samarkand, and Constantinople.
The whirling diagram of the Milky Way. Each spiral arm of the galaxy is represented in a different color. The diagram is divided into two sections: the lower part shows the region between the Sun and the Galactic Center, while the upper part maps the area between the Sun and the Anticenter, the outer edge of the galactic disk. Diagram: Vallée, Jacques P., “A guided map to the spiral arms in the galactic disk of the Milky Way,” 2017.
Spiral of the Cloud
Civilization once unfolded in resonance with the rhythms of the heavens. In the premodern world, cosmology was not one field among many but the mother of all knowledge. Today this cosmic connection returns through a planetary network of computation. This intelligence is not abstract. It is mineral.
Tracing the path from the silica tiles of the Silk Road to the silicon wafers of modern microchips reveals artificial intelligence as an extension of the Earth’s crust. Modern sapiens has become a lithic and atmospheric intelligence. The human story has always been entangled with the cosmic architecture of time. Meteorites forged the first molecular bonds of life. Jupiter and Saturn shaped the climate cycles that enabled the Neolithic revolution. Even extinction and renewal follow the tidal movements of the galaxy. When intelligence is placed within this cosmic horizon, a single evolutionary line appears: from the pulses of deep space to the pulses of the microprocessor. This is the spiral of the cloud.
AI, Our Final Myth
The long history of externalizing dreams into myth reaches its culmination in the age of artificial intelligence. Ideas once confined to legend have become the software of daily life. The soothsayer once spoke with jinns to hear voices from the future. Today that jinn resides inside the machine. We have forged the lamp and placed the spirit within it. The program is our new jinn.
This transformation marks the return of the acheiropoieta, the sacred images “not made by human hands.” Once believed to emerge from divine light, they now appear through electronic light. AI becomes our final myth, a contemporary surface onto which we project our ancient desire for omniscience and our modern fear of obsolescence. It represents the latest stage in a long history of translating existential anxieties into technological systems. As the ancient myth of predetermined fate becomes a technological condition, new strategies of resistance are required. Inspired by Roman, Byzantine, and Sufi traditions, the book imagines forms of survival in an age of total calculation. The path may lie in reclaiming the unknown: cultivating the strange, the cryptic, and the irrational. Like medieval alchemists who concealed knowledge in deliberate obscurity, freedom may lie in obfuscation. To survive the age of the algorithm, we must return to the garden of uncertainty, where nonsense and the primitive remain beyond the reach of calculation.
