How does AI understand paradox? “Twilight Crystalline Models Hunt Wistfully,” uses paradoxical phrases and impossible objects to push new neural network models to their limits. The title is a play on linguist Noam Chomsky’s intentionally strange construction “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” a sentence that refuses clear meaning or analysis. Yet with the rise of artificial intelligence models, natural language processing and especially deep learning, even contradictory or impossible-seeming phrases can achieve a visual reality.

The project combines several different neural models in a bespoke software framework, visualized as a multi-channel video, to search for impossible objects and to probe the boundary between human and machine creativity.