Trippy Training Data

An artist's book that presents a dataset for teaching a computer to experience an LSD trip.

The images come from a Reddit community where people share questions and experiences about taking LSD. Contributors try to capture their hallucinations with phone cameras, and the pictures are mostly of mundane things such as cold pizza and bathroom floor tiles, paired with emphatic all-caps captions. The premise is that an algorithm fed labeled data will generalize rules and find patterns whether or not any meaningful ones exist. The book runs 58 pages and measures 10 by 7.5 inches. It was published in 2021 by Unknown Unknowns.

Angie Waller is a visual artist working between Los Angeles and New York whose projects draw on data mining, found material, video, installation and websites. Earlier works include Data Mining the Amazon (2003) and Most Searched Fears (2012). Unknown Unknowns is her own imprint for books and interactive projects.