Kinder Scout is a landmark experiment premiering at Art Basel Miami Beach. Drawing on Ken Stanley's research into novelty search and the ethos of the right-to-roam movement, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst present a protocol that explores uncharted regions of a diffusion model's latent space in pursuit of truly uncommon images. The artists have trained an expedition team of agents with distinct roles. Some embody their personal aesthetic sensibilities, while others serve as critics, filtering out images that feel too familiar. The work unfolds on a digital canvas that visualizes these agents on their mission, traversing, arguing, and discovering in real time.

What is Novelty Search: Novelty Search is an algorithm developed by Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley that abandons traditional objective-based optimization in favor of rewarding behavioral novelty. Rather than directly pursuing a specific goal, Novelty Search explores diverse solutions by prioritizing new and different behaviors. This counterintuitive approach often outperforms traditional methods on deceptive problems where the gradient toward the objective leads to local optima. Stanley's research demonstrates that "abandoning objectives is often the only way to outperform the direct search for the objective." The algorithm has been influential in evolutionary computation, open-ended evolution, and quality diversity research. In the context of Kinder Scout, Novelty Search principles allow the AI agents to discover truly unique and unexpected images by avoiding the well-trodden paths that lead to familiar aesthetic outcomes.