Mishka Henner’s hybrid monsters

It’s hairy, bushy, shaggy. We guess vaguely, hidden under the tufts of hair, a protuberance which would indicate something like a muzzle or legs. Unless it is rather a plant, with a trunk and leaves? The creature in question is composed of familiar elements, and yet it resists analysis. This funny animal, both realistic and unreal, was born thanks to the sorcerer’s apprentice Mishka Henner. For twelve years, this British visual artist has used the Internet as the primary resource for all his work and has given birth to new hybrid species, generated by artificial intelligence.

Mishka Henner talks nicely about “machine dreams” or“computer oblivious” to evoke these funny beasts born from electronic circuits. He also makes the link between his bizarre images and the dreamlike works of the surrealist current of the XX^e century : “The works of the Surrealists were haunted by memories of the First World War. I think these images carry the fantasies or nightmares of computer programmers…”

To lull reason and generate its monsters, Mishka Henner used GANs, or Generative Adversarial Networks, algorithms trained to generate realistic images. Artificial intelligence systems originally designed to identify humans or other patterns in images, and which are used on a daily basis to develop surveillance systems or make car software capable of recognizing dangers . But Mishka Henner is much less interested in practical applications than in psychological and cultural implications. “What is a realistic image? Realism is an idea, a concept that expresses our representation of the world. These images are, in fact, a simulation of a simulation, an attempt by the machine to represent our way of seeing the world. »

“An infinite variety of children”

With his chimeras, he explored with delight the territory of the “uncanny valley” or “strange valley”, a notion invented in the 1970s to evoke the discomfort and anguish felt by people when they find themselves facing an object with some degree of anthropomorphic resemblance. By asking the computer to cross different kinds of images from databases, according to directives kept secret, Mishka Henner produced rather animal creatures, possible crosses of lions and palm trees, but also buildings which hesitate between tent and the skyscraper, or flowers that seem to have merged with their vase, and even sunny landscapes where the sea carries dubious debris… “It is with the “animals” that it is the strangest…, acknowledges the artist. With them, there is always the question of whether it is alive, animated. »

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