Clouds Panorama is a 200-foot long mosaic that depicts a day, from sunrise to sunset through a machine-learned interpretation of the Arizona sky. The work is a portrait of the town of Sahuarita, Arizona. One way to represent a community is to reflect it’s own sense of place and judging from its collective social media feed, a significant part of its Sahuarita’s identity is tied to the clear light and dramatic cloud formations of its desert sky.

Using machine-learning, Clouds Panorama learns from thousands of images of the sky over Sahuarita. To create the piece, a machine-learning algorithm was trained on a database of sky images. Over time, the algorithm learns to create similar images — new images that look like photographs but are wholly synthetic images imagined by the computer.