2025 - Simple Noodle Art ｜Magic Noise: How AI Wanders in the Latent Space

Lin & Lin Gallery is pleased to present Simple Noodle Art's solo exhibition Magic Noise: How AI Wanders in the Latent Space on 30th August. The exhibition continues on the artists' focus on algorithmic generation and visual representation, beginning with the core themes of 'AI algorithm' and 'noise'. Using figurative devices such as the Galton board and the Physionotrace, the artists engage in a dialogue with AI diffusion models, combining the 18th century traditional portrait-tracing machine with contemporary artificial intelligence to explore how AI wanders around the real and virtual worlds through noise, reinterpreting the potential forms of portrait painting. Moreover, the self-similar fractal geometries and the deviations—residuals left by both printing and hand-drawing— echo the noise, further reinventing the humans and technological imagination and perception of creativity.

The works "Latent Physionotrace" and "Residual Noise" start with the exploration of 'Gaussian Noise' in the 'Latent Space,' and build the world from a new perception. Since the Deep Neural Networks became the mainstream AI technology, a virtual world modeled on the real world but not restricted by human space and perception has gradually been constructed—the Latent Space.

On the other hand, 'Gaussian Noise' is originally referred to a type of random signal that typically stems from the various random fluctuations in nature. These signals have the property of Normal Distribution, which is exactly that most signals are close to the average and the further away from the average, the lower the probability. This phenomenon can be observed in the real world with the Galton board device—the balls are dropped from the top and bottom as the device flips, collected into tracks at the bottom randomly, and the final height of accumulated balls columns is a bell-curve normal distribution. Therefore, the noise generated by this distribution is Gaussian Noise.

In "Latent Physionotrace," the artists calculate the Gaussian noise required for AI to generate images in the latent space through the random distribution created by the Galton board device and use a modified late 18th century Physionotrace that combines with an LCD screen and electric machines to depict the profile silhouette portraits on paper, reflecting the image production mechanism of the historical device and algorithms.

Furthermore, in "Residual Noise," the image generated by programming is layered on top of the hand-drawing. By subtracting the overlapping parts reveals a subtle difference between the human error and computational accuracy.

Whether they are profile portraits from chaotic to sharp gradually in "Latent Physionotrace," or the line traces left due to the hand-drawing errors in "Residual Noise," the artists try to combine the seemingly disorder and random 'noise' from real life with AI algorithms in a virtual world to explore the image generation mechanism, further advancing from the 'accurate' and 'standardized' machine mechanism of vision that evolved from the subjective interpretation of human beings in the past to the 'reorganized' and 'stochastic' latent representation. These portraits generated by algorithms, while breaking away from traditional physical depictions, also repeatedly interpret the generation mode of 'simulating and reorganizing others,' reflecting the individual's continuous questioning of self-identity and what creativity is in the massive information world.

Simple Noodle Art is an art collective founded by Chen Zi-Yin and Chuang Hsiang-Feng in 2019. Chen Zi-Yin was born in 1995, and graduated from the M.F.A Program, Department of New Media Art, Taipei National University of the Arts; Chuang Hsiang-Feng was born in 1994, and graduated from the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University. They use diverse media, including installation, video, photography, and AI, and explore the interaction between technology and humans through interdisciplinary thinking to create works like this collective name "simple noodles" with simple ingredients, but with an amazing taste. They have won many awards including FutureTense Awards 3rd Edition, Prix Ars Electromica, Taipei Art Awards, National Art Exhibition R.O.C., Next Art Tainan, Nanying Award. In the following the selected solo exhibition, including Magic Noise: How AI Wanders in the Latent Space, Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan, 2025; Gain 100K+ followers week by week, Wei Ming Ming, Taipei, Taiwan, 2023; Between Fitting and Emulation, Wei Ming Ming, Taipei, Taiwan, 2023; Pixel Extension, Absolute Space for the Arts, Tainan, Taiwan, 2022; The Tangent Line To Cognition, Serendipity Art Space, Taipei, Taiwan, 2021. Their works have also been exhibited at venues, including Adaptér technology knowledge center in Hungary, Ars Electronica in Austrian, L.E.V. Festival in Spain, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Hong-gah Museum, Just Art Museum, and so on.