Jake Elwes – Latent Space (2017). Special thanks to Anh Nguyen et al. at Evolving-AI for their research on GANs. In artificial intelligence, the term latent space refers to the mathematical environment in which a neural network maps the patterns it has learned from visual data. After training on millions of images—trees, birds, faces, and beyond—the network begins to locate each category in distinct regions of this abstract space. By reverse-engineering these coordinates, the AI can generate entirely new, synthetic images that reflect what it has learned. Latent Space is a generative video work that invites us into this process. Using a neural network trained on 14.2 million photographs (from the ImageNet database), Jake Elwes visualises the AI’s journey not between fixed points, but through the in-between—the ambiguous zones where categories blur and meaning dissolves. The result is a hallucinatory, dreamlike sequence: an AI imagining the world from within, navigating the fuzzy boundaries of learned perception. At once beautiful and unsettling, Latent Space captures the uncanny emergence of machine imagination.

Jake Elwes (b. 1993) is a media artist who explores machine learning and artificial intelligence. Their work finds poetry and narrative in these systems' success and failures, their sophistication, and limitations, while investigating their code and ethics. In notable work, the Zizi Project, Elwes exposes AI bias by queering datasets with drag performers, simultaneously demystifying and subverting AI systems.

Elwes lives and works in London, having studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2013-17). The artist's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Somerset House, London; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Honor Fraser Gallery, LA; Fundacion Telefonica Museum, Madrid; Ars Electronica, Austria; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Sculpture in the City, London; Science Gallery Dublin; RMIT Gallery, Melbourne; Onassis Foundation, Athens; Arebyte Gallery, London; E-WERK Freiburg, Germany; Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin; Nature Morte, Delhi, India; Centre for the Future of Intelligence, UK, and they have been featured on TV: ZDF aspekte (Germany) and the BBC Arts (UK).