The artist collective Obvious is composed of three French artists who use artificial intelligence to generate images and visual concepts. Their research is grounded in the idea that art and technology are not separate fields but deeply interconnected dimensions: algorithms, neural networks, and AI models become creative materials on par with brushes and pigments. In their view, the development and spread of digital technologies do not represent a rupture, but rather the natural continuation of the innovations that have transformed visual language throughout history—from the invention of perspective to the emergence of photography.
With the IMAGINE project, Obvious takes a further conceptual and technological leap, pushing their research toward a new form of contemporary surrealism. The trio has combined neuroscience with advanced artificial intelligence techniques to develop a process capable of reconstructing images directly from their imagination. Thought, fantasy, and the subconscious thus become active and measurable materials, translatable into images through the mediation of the machine. The artist thinks, imagines, mentally evokes a subject: the AI interprets those brain signals, detected through MRI, and transforms them into a visual representation. In this way, generative art becomes a device that gives form to what would normally remain confined to the intangible space of the mind—a technological homage to the surrealist tradition and its fascination with the unconscious.
It is through this very protocol that Fungal Outgrowths was created. To produce it, the artist simply imagined a mushroom, and the resulting work represents the reinterpreted translation of that thought. The image appears unstable, almost inverted, marked by ambiguous forms and textures that fade into indistinctness—a visual quality that recalls the founding principles of surrealism, a movement that did not aim to faithfully depict reality, but to manifest what escapes logic, what exists between memory, dream, and unconscious associations. Despite its dreamlike and deliberately blurred nature, the work still allows the initial subject to emerge: the silhouette of the mushroom, recognizable in its colors and volumes yet distant from its real form, as though arising from a distorted memory or an imagined vision.
The collective’s working process is highly scientific. The artists trained AI models based on correlations between their brain activity and the images they were asked to visualize mentally during the MRI scan. Once the training phase was completed, the algorithms became capable of generating visual estimates of newly conceived images.
The aesthetic uniting this series is deliberately surrealist—not only because of the visual outcome, but above all because of the process itself, which represents a conceptual and methodological legacy of surrealism, reinterpreted through the tools of the twenty-first century.
Their practice succeeds in uniting the poetic dimension with the scientific one: the works are in fact strictly governed by protocols, grounded in formulas, shaped by algorithms. It is a form of research conceived as a consistent and coherent working method, in which human intuition and technological precision converge to give tangible form to the thoughts that inhabit the invisible world.
Obvious, FUNGAL OUTGROWTHS, 2024
80×60 cm
Two-layer digigraphic print on cotton texture paper, 4-Blacks deep overprint, signed with GAN model loss function in ink
26/11/25
