Working with research assistant Philipp Schmitt, we fed a generative adversarial network (GAN) a series of images of impossible objects in the hope that it would propose new ones. Slowly, what looked to us like hesitant sketches began to emerge, before collapsing into a dense, impenetrable series of marks. We collated the GAN’s efforts into a sketch book. Each page shows a selection of attempts to generate new impossible objects. None succeed. But collectively, they suggest something lying just beyond what can be represented graphically. It’s as if a machine, for a moment, attempted to show to humans in a visual language we understand, what is permanently unknowable to us.

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