Leach’s exhibition Fully Automatic evokes many dreams. Digital dreams, utopic techno dreams, musings, wonderings, the dream of landscape painting and, perhaps, even the odd nightmare. These paintings are strange imaginings from an emergent digital age, an age truly unprecedented in human history, so entirely unique to our time, that these works would be impossible in any other era. Yet, despite being spun from the gossamer stuff of dreams, just like the digital itself, these otherworldly images are based in hard materiality and process.

To the nuts and bolts then. The artist worked with physicist Dr Matthew McAuley from Belfast to Artificial Intelligence capable of inventing images. Using algorithms rom an Open Source code - DCGAN (Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network) - the artist feeds the AI with a series of images. These are drawn from the history of art and architecture and often pair unlikely bedfellows, among them - Fragonard, Super Studio, Boucher, Archi-Zoom, Bosch and selections from the artist’s own past work.

The algorithm both generates and discriminates. One part ‘looks’ at the constitutive pixels and their surrounds, seeking spatial resemblances and differences to create an image. The other part compares the output with the original dataset to determine whether the image is successful - either ‘fake’ or ‘real’. This is particularly startling and begins to resemble something unsettlingly like consciousness. The generative AI reconsiders its efforts, attempting to predict the next logical painting from prior efforts, hoping to trick the discriminator into classifying it as ‘real’. Hence the ‘Adversarial’ in the DCGAN - both elements of the algorithm question and consider their success adapting their code to ‘improve’ their outputs.

This process takes many hundreds of thousands of repeated passes. Early iterations resemble a cloud of dots and even highly-resolved images are smeared, blurred and uncertain. A kind of mechanized, computer generated collage then, but this also sounds disturbingly like an artist - re-examining their work, shifting to seek new and better results. The machine remains entrapped within the premises presented to it, the raw material chosen by Leach. No android can dream of electric sheep without instruction, at least, not yet.