Inside a Genius Mind
July 2023 | By A Collaboration between Emeritus Professor Martin Kemp, Google Arts & Culture, Artist in Residence Martial Geoffre-Rouland and Nexus Studios.
Dive into Leonardo Da Vinci’s personal notebooks - his codices - exploring themes across time and subject matter with the help of machine learning.
Collection:
Leonardo: Inside A Genius Mind is a Google Arts & Culture experiment using machine learning to weave together the content of these notebooks, drawing thematic connections across the codices.
This experiment presents a new way to explore the codices. Through a series of curated stories we take you on a journey through his unique drawings and thought process.
Leonardo’s codices speak to us visually over a span of 500 years.
As you move freely through the experience, you will soon discover how an idea contained within one drawing links to another in both inventive and unexpected ways. Each story takes you on different journey to reveal how Leonardo arrived at some extraordinary innovations, each illustrated with it’s own animated experiment.
A Collaboration between Emeritus Professor Martin Kemp, Google Arts & Culture, Artist in Residence Martial Geoffre-Rouland and Nexus Studios.
BACKGROUND
Throughout his life Leonardo meticulously recorded his thoughts and observations about the world around him in notebooks - collectively called “codices”. They contain astonishingly detailed drawings and personal notes recorded in his unique ‘mirror’, or backwards writing.
While fascinating, Leonardo’s vast codices can be daunting to explore. Where do you begin when you want to explore the mind of a genius?
Inside A Genius Mind uses machine learning in a radically new way to weave together the content of the notebooks, drawing thematic connections across time and subject matter to reflect Leonardo’s spirit of interdisciplinary imagination, innovation and the profound unity at the heart of his apparently diverse pursuits.
THE PROJECT
Leonardo’s genius lay in his ability to make extraordinary connections. Within the multitude of codices are far-reaching and often interconnecting ideas which he was often able to link together in creative new ways that led him to ground-breaking innovations - from radical inventions for flying machines to new theories about sound and mathematics.
By analysing over 718 pages from a number of Leonardo’s key codices and organising over 3,000 extracted drawings according to compelling visual echoes, Inside a Genius Mind transforms the diverse contents of the codices into an interactive visual journey, engaging audiences with a powerful tool to learn more about the complexities and connections that run throughout Leonardo’s genius, rendering clear what seems obscure. The aim is to let Leonardo speak to us visually over the span of 500 years.
Using technology to sort through the complexities of the notebooks has allowed Leonardo’s research into water, for example, to be grouped together with images of plants or swirls of hair, despite being from different codex volumes. This highlights his fundamental passion that connects all of his research and art - the underlying laws of nature.