Latent Spacecraft Project Draws Deep Analogies Between GAN Latent Spaces and Human Brains

begusgasper · x · 2026-08-18

Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans is a research/art project by Nina Beguš, Gašper Beguš with Metahaven and Riccardo Petrini.

Core thesis: latent space is not just a mathematical novelty—through literature it can be read as a structure akin to architectural interiority, one that both grounds and transcends its physical substrate, much like the brain producing language from the physical to the symbolic.
Three tightly linked case studies illuminate analogies between biological and synthetic latent spaces:
A speech-generating GAN (fiwGAN, trained on English words) is paralleled with child language acquisition; latent-space reflections of speech sounds closely mimic brain responses to those sounds, and fiwGAN learns via informative imitation.
The project uses literary texts like Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a medium for exploring machine latent spaces through human language.

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