cannibality:

canofstars:

joekewlio:

naidje:

rasec-wizzlbang:

slartibartfastibast:

Deep Frog

do you think this is what lovecraft meant whenever he described something as being beyond description

“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”

— H. P. Lovecraft,

At the Mountains of Madness

This.. actually makes a fine reference to what a lovecraftian eldritch abomination SHOULD BE. not just.. tentacles and darkness. Perpetually changing, not cemented in form, with an otherworldly feel to it. Completely unrecognizable by most human descriptions, and only able to be viable perceived by those fine enough to be an adept wordsmith.

I think that this is very nearly an ideal representation of a lovecraftian eldritch horror, because the video that we see is (I’m fairly certain) footage that has been fed through Google deep dream.

The reason the frog looks so weird is because the program is trying to look at the frog, figure out what it is, and then overlay other images of the same thing.

The the thing about lovecraftian horrors issn’t just that they look conventionally weird or gross or scary. Instead, they are things that are so utterly alien that the human mind cannot properly comprehend what it is looking at. They defy description because they defy understanding.

And here we have a video of a computer, a simple silicon substitute for the human mind, struggling to understand what it is looking at, in much the same way that you would be hard pressed to understand a shoggoth.

(HP Lovecraft was a cracker devil and I’m glad he’s dead) another interesting thing is that Lovecraft (fuck him) always said we couldn’t comprehend these things because they’re fundamentally exterior to our experiences. We can only attempt to recognise them through an analogy to what our own limited experiences are already capable of understanding. Thus, Cthulhu itself is not a big rubbery monster with a tentacle head and wings, but that is the closest explanation that humans are capable of giving of Cthulhu because what Cthulhu qua Cthulhu is, is completely beyond anything any human is capable of knowing.

Now, what I think is interesting is that this Deep Dream experiment actually does a good job of replicating that. Here, Deep Dream is running using a neural net that has only ever seen, from what I can guess, pictures of dogs. As far as this AI is concerned, all that exists is pictures of dogs. Now, suddenly, it’s confronted with something that is extremely NOT pictures of dogs. It’s something, and the neural net is straining to understand what that thing is and explain it, but because it’s understanding of the world is so limited, and the thing that it’s being asked to describe is so Other, it can only describe it with reference to pictures of dogs.

So this little video is, in effect, a miniature replication of the thing about seeing elder horrors that would send you mad – if HP Lovecraft (who is dead and deserves to be dead) wasn’t just doing all of this to make some inane point about how brown people are scary. Fuck him. Cool video though.