Beck launches Hyperspace: AI Exploration, a visual album with NASA

In the dream collaboration of pretty much anyone, Beck has joined forces with NASA for the release of Hyperspace: AI Exploration, a visual album merging science and art.

Taking his most recent album Hyperspace on an “interstellar journey” creatively, the project combines “publicly available NASA mission images, curated with assistance from NAPA JPL, visualisations, animations and data with revolutionary Artificial Intelligence tech,” along with Beck’s album, explains a release on the project. “The result is the creation of new worlds borne from NASA missions, each soundtracked by Beck’s songs”.

The project was made possible by AI architects and directors OSK, founded by artists Jon Ray and Isabelle Albuquerque, who began the project by asking, “How would artificial intelligence imagine our universe?” In answering this question it allowed the directors to create “a unique AI utilising computer vision, machine learning and Generative Adversarial neural Networks (GAN) to learn from NASA’s vast archives.” The AI then trained itself through these thousands of images, data and videos, to then begin “creating its own visions of our universe.”

Resulting in 12 videos for each of the tracks on Hyperspace, each exploration is its very own “journey across space, time and beyond”. Individually the short explore different surfaces, intermittently switching between shots dependent on the context and tempo of the track it is visualising. On the project itself Beck adds: “I think each song is kind of a different way that different people ‘hyperspace’ – we escape from the reality that we’re dealing with.”