Neural Turing Patterns

In nature, there are structures that emerge spontaneously. They were first studied by the English mathematician Alan Turing (1912 - 1954), who also introduced the concept of the contemporary computational machine. Examples of these shapes are stripes, spots, grids, tessellations, bubbles, spirals, foams and waves. In the specific case of this artwork, a collection of Turing patterns is generated through brain simulations. Each square is a network of neural cells that are activated with low (blue), medium (white) and high (red) intensity. Many of them look very similar, while others are very different. Thus grouped, the images appear to have a graphic continuity with those closest to them. But this visual feature is actually a Gestalt illusion, because they are completely independent simulation results.

This work won the 'Brain and Art prize 2021' competition at the University of Aix-Marseille and was exhibited at the Marseille gallery 'Le Pangolin'. Furthermore, in the 'Beautiful mistakes' section, the work won first prize at the OHBM 2022 (Organisation of Human Brain Mapping) conference in Glasgow, UK (booklet available at https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0C9SJJQ3D).