4I-4rt

Kevin Abosch

By early 2015, neural networks had mastered the art of 'image-to-text' and could create natural language captions for images. Flipping this process, and turning text into image, was a much more complex challenge solved by 19-year old prodigy Elman Mansimov's alignDRAW model.Fellowship is pleased to present a special release of fully on-chain* NFTs of this historical artwork, containing all the original 32x32 pixel images created in 2015.

Elman Mansimov

A group of happy elephants in the green grass field #103

An airplane with its landing wheels out landing #75

A blue school bus parked in a parking lot #45

A green school bus parked in a parking lot #63

A yellow school bus parked in a parking lot #57

A picture of a dark sky #27

A yellow school bus is flying in blue skies #3

A yellow school bus is walking across a green grass field #9

Sofia Crespo

A person skiing on sand clad vast desert #1

A very large commercial airplane walking in the green grass field #53

A toilet seat sits open in an empty bathroom #16

[[[vessel_within_vessel_0099]]]

A person skiing on snow clad vast mountain #81

A picture of a morning sky #41

An airplane flying off into the distance at night #116

A very large commercial airplane sitting on surfboard in the water #9

A group of happy elephants in the dry grass field #23

A brown horse is grazing in a beach #44

An airplane flying off into the distance on a clear day #83

A brown horse is grazing in a field #73

A herd of elephants flying in the blue skies #105

A toilet seat sits open in the grass field #115

“Crossing the Interface (DAO),” it adapts a 2014 performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Each piece in the series is a short, AI-generated video that draws on documentation of the earlier work. The animations project the worried, meandering line characteristic of GAN art into the temporal dimension. The visual field is organized by shapes that move in repetitive, quasi-recursive patterns, creating a feeling of both movement and stasis.

Crossing the Interface (DAO) V

Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo)

Memo Akten

An exploration into the minds of an artificial, and a biological, neural network. Continuing on from my "Journey through the layers of the mind" (2015), "Learning to See" (2017-) and "Deep Meditations" series (2018-); continuing investigations into Deep Visual Instruments for Latent Story-telling - Deep Learning models as an artistic medium for new modes of performative, creative expression with abstract narrative.

Created using custom software using VQGAN+CLIP.

Roope Rainisto

Ira Greenberg

Anne Spalter

A spaceship flying through sunrise, day, sunset, and night. Created with the help of text-to-image AI (VQGAN+CLIP).

Pindar van Arman

Jason Salavon

From a collection of 1000 unique pieces, each TODEM.x is a standalone tile that seamlessly integrates with 999 others to form the vast TODEM GIF. As a unique element of a thousand-piece puzzle, each animation is a distinctive work of art while also contributing to the larger, intricately woven vision of the entire composition. TODEM (Tapestry of Decadent Meritocracy) is a colossal AI-generated GIF that unfolds like an animated tapestry, navigable via a map-style interface. By harnessing generative AI to produce content on an industrial scale, it explores themes of polarity, amorality, and meritocracy while probing emerging possibilities for AI and blockchain in art. With dimensions of 100K x 58K pixels (~2800 HD screens or 5800 megapixels), TODEM might just be the largest animation ever crafted. See the full GIF [here] (https://latentculture.com/todem/).

Collaboration with Tiga James Sontag (@tiga) The track, an ode to UDH (Unified Dancefloor Humanity), has been sliced and matched with Ivonas crowd imagery.

Visuals were created by training a custom AI model on a curated set of several thousand photographs. All of the photographs were selected from the artist’s personal archive, spanning almost a decade of her career as a concert photographer. While the captured musical performances differ in their style, genre, countries and locations, they all illustrate humanity united in love for music. When experiencing this shared passion, all boundaries and differences disappear. Through the use of generative adversarial networks (GAN) and ambiguous imagery, Ivona aims to create a universal representation of crowd madness guided by sound.

Spaceship: Full Day Flight

Slender bitGAN (#262)

The Service of Silence

Deeper Meditations #1 (1/1)

Contortion

Mike Tyka

The series, titled "Portraits of Imaginary People" explores the latent space of human faces by training a generative adversarial neural network (GAN) to imagine and then depict portraits of people who don’t exist. The work is inspired by and named after Russian troll accounts spreading disinformation during the 2016 elections.

More information

paolakinck

Ravi Vora & Phil Bosua (AIIV)

Explosion of Color is the Genesis collection of AIIV, an AI art collaboration by Ravi Vora and Phil Bosua.

100 AI generated unique artworks exploring concepts and inspiring us to imagine a better life through art. Through the works in this collection we experience how our lives and the lives of others are connected. The goal is not just to create art, but to use art as a vessel to stimulate humanity.

Explosion of Color #73

MaryCarry92

We've created unique "Quantum AI Data Paintings" using quantum bit strings generated from Google Quantum AI team's beyond classical experiment together with a Generative Adversarial Network machine learning algorithm that was developed during the production of Quantum Memories.

The data collection consists of 200 million raw images of landscapes around the world, including all the national parks in the US.

By utilizing custom procedural coherent noise implementations and beyond classical measurements of computing surflets, we generated 1000 unique Quantum AI Data Paintings inspired by the natural world. Each painting is computed with a unique quantum bit string!

The images incorporate earthly pigments, shapes, and patterns that we associate with our sensory experiences, while paying homage to the Earth's unbounded poetic sublimity.

Heliodoro Santos

Synthetic landscape generated with machine learning, painted with a drawing robot.

Primavera III

aurèce vettier (Paul Mouginot)

Since 2018, we've trained GANs as part of the Potential Herbarium series, on more than 4 million herbarium boards, and generated many fascinating imaginary plant shapes. These shapes are quite anti-darwinian, and are a seminal constituant of our visual research at @aurecevettier

Article In Conversation With Anika Meier

element/pass1fl0ra

Bard Ionson

Drones, a feature of the automatic war The propaganda repeats The automation keeps time The Intelligence of each nation battles for what everyone forgot The end of time projected by those who assume the future will be like the past The narcissistic prophets who told the future by programming it into the machine

Drone War

RE: ROAD TRIP by Margaret Murphy is a series of 200 AI-generated images reimagining the historically influential photographic genre of the road trip through the perspective of the contemporary female gaze. Murphy considers how this revered category has shaped and defined contemporary fine art photography using style influences, including artists such as Stephen Shore, Ed Ruscha, and Joel Sternfeld.

daily.xyz AIartwork - daily curated

emprops.ai

Day #4 - Memory

Alsoguppyme: Day #17 - Body parts

Day #11 - We Just Got Here

Running a Fever: Day #7 - Hurricane

Ilya Bliznets

Summer is often considered the season that is all about joy, novelty and adventure. Summer knows we are all posing, hoping for a hashtag selfie in the sun. Summer time is never quite what we imagine it to be, and it is forever unattainable. The Summer of 2022 has come to an end, or it never really did?

Interweaving between probability and contingency, the "Summer Romance" GAN series with a minimalistic look embraces the human existence of circles and cycles. The past lives, déjà vu and time ahead blend in the collective consciousness which is shared with the mastermind of AI.

"Taking 'The Muses' project as a whole—as the entire long-form collection, not just the individual works—and assuming that the "male gaze", the "female gaze", and the "male gaze reproduced by women" are all mashed up, almost remixed, across its 500 images, what does that tell us about the collection's overall meaning?

With artificial intelligence's help, can "The Muses" point the way to constructing a new type of "gaze", removed from gender assignment?" (Anika Meier)

In his continuous experimentation with artificial intelligence, Marlon created “Ang Alamat ng Panaginip” (The Myth of Dream) and trained an AI to create illustrations from scanned bargain books collected over the years. He then fed the illustrations to the AI to use as source data and to generate illustrations that seem abstracted from what can be imagined were their prior form.

Impressionist Illustration 13

Vortex of dreams

Niceaunties

Depicting dreams has long been a practice that borders on something almost absurd. They are intricate, abstract, fragmented and mostly fleeting visuals manifested only in one person, and when shared with others they seem to take a step toward a more grounded existence. Perhaps this grounding of the ephemeral emphasises the intimacy of sharing dreams and, of course, makes them somewhat more real.

In le travail des rêves, aurèce vettier does exactly this. He invites the viewer to participate in his personal dreamscape, encouraging us to submerge ourselves in his memories, from childhood until current times. Though with an indication in the prompt used for its creation and in the title of each piece, the viewer is still left with space for interpretation. Furthermore, with the low resolution of the pieces, the viewer is forced to search their own memories and dreamscape and, perhaps, also reflect upon what dreams might symbolise.

Agoria (Sébastien Devaud)

Yuma Kishi (Obake AI)

loopytezoverse

Auntieverse

Auntie's Spa: Legitimate Business

Niceaunties Day #39

Alice Gordon

Irina Angles and Dr Formalyst

Almost Human

Fragile Memories #05: Loneliness, On An Autumn Evening

The Agoraphobic Traveller (Jacqui Kenny)

Alexander Mordvintsev

Eponym

fairy tale

Helena Sarin (NeuralBricolage)

Disproportionate Anxiety

Cognitiv Behaviour

Self-awareness

Third Eye Implant

Day #35 - Black Sunday

The Age of Self Indulgence

Flore Perdue

Journey through the layers of the mind

1111

Sun Signals

888

COMMENT OUT

Temporary Permanence

Excessize

Los Angelizing delves into the exaggerated cultural perceptions of Los Angeles, shedding light on the city's hidden complexities. Through the use of AI, Murphy amplifies depictions of the subtle extremes of the city’s iconic imagery, challenging viewers to reconsider their preconceptions of the city’s identity and its inhabitants.

viña del mar

Margaret Murphy

RE: ROAD TRIP

Los Angelizing

Oscar After Party

a perfect storm

Generation 2 (EpoStory)

Generation 1

Running a Fever Day

X New Worlds

Dancevatar

nouseskou

(loop (format t "~%"))

Osf 2

Oss 1

Pierre Zandrowicz

Alsoguppyme

pygmalion

Vacation

Slumber Party

Visit The Cave

Flower Electric

Barn Quilt Show

AI Spaceships

Outerspace Steampunk

Outerspace Interceptor

Outerspace Sentient

Lumina - The Convergence of Death

chaotic serenity

tiananmen square massacre

alignDRAW

A Father And His Child In Front Of A Lighthouse

DreamScapes

Xander Steenbrugge

Harvest

Gene Kogan

Golan Levin

These faces are “ambigrams”: images that are legible both upside-down and right-side up. Created with a machine learning system, they may be displayed in any orientation. In this project, a collection of 55 such ambigrammatic faces have been generated in high resolution.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bivalent face illusions were often used to depict uncomplicated dualities, such as young-old, good-evil, or blessed-damned. The faces in the Ambigrammatic Figures deck reflect the moral ambiguities of a darker and more uncertain time, marked by ecological crisis, misinformation, identitarianism, patriarchal authoritarianism, and the social unrest of a polity divided against itself.

Source

Google Research "Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks"

Portraits of Imaginary People

Ambigrammatic Figures

Potential Herbarium

Seeds

Generating Images from Captions with Attention by Elman Mansimov, Emilio Parisotto, Jimmy Lei Ba & Ruslan Salakhutdinov [Submitted on 9 Nov 2015 (v1), last revised 29 Feb 2016 (this version, v2)]

"Motivated by the recent progress in generative models, we introduce a model that generates images from natural language descriptions. The proposed model iteratively draws patches on a canvas, while attending to the relevant words in the description. After training on Microsoft COCO, we compare our model with several baseline generative models on image generation and retrieval tasks. We demonstrate that our model produces higher quality samples than other approaches and generates images with novel scene compositions corresponding to previously unseen captions in the dataset [...]

In this paper, we illustrate how sequential deep learning techniques can be used to build a conditional probabilistic model over natural image space effectively. By extending the Deep Recurrent Attention Writer (DRAW) (Gregor et al., 2015), our model iteratively draws patches on a canvas, while attending to the relevant words in the description. Overall, the main contributions of this work are the following: we introduce a conditional alignDRAW model, a generative model of images from captions using a soft attention mechanism."

Conditional alignDRAW Model

DeepDream

GAN

Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst

Memo Akten

Seahorses Blooming in Abundance

"Seahorses Blooming in Abundance" The seafloor whispers with every grain of sand as creatures of myth glide through the water, a myriad of forms dancing in a silent ballet. Hues of coral and ocean currents blend, embracing in an aquatic mosaic. Seahorses, delicate and fierce, champions of the gentle depths, cradle life's fragile essence in their coiled tails. Their bodies carry the weight of beauty, slender and curving, echoing the motion of the waves above. Emerging life finds sanctuary in their form—so slender, so serene. The vast blue deep is laden with the echo of mystery, each creature a testament to the enigma of the marine world. Seahorses, emblems of fluidity and patience, are in a symphony of slow undulation. They conjure growth in stillness—the patient unfolding of life beneath the surface. Bubbles of possibility rise, drifting towards an unknowable destiny above. The motion is perpetual, ethereal, the seahorses' dance transcends the mere concept of time. Nature's ingenuity is revealed in each curve, in the stark ridges of their bodies, as selection's hand sculpts them in the quiet forge of evolution. What insights do these beings hold in their unhurried journey through the depths, as custodians of life's continuity? Their silent procession is a testament to the strength in softness, the power within vulnerability—a parable etched in living form.

The Awakening Of The Forest

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)

Brain Loops

Neural Networks

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Network

VQGAN + CLIP

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)

Transformer Model

Multimodal Transformers DALL-E

Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst

Natural Language Processing (NLP): Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)

Infinite Images

Sasha Stiles

Jane Le Besque (& Brennan Goddard)

Spannungsbogen

Hibiscus

Linda Dounia

Homes of Argleton Lane

DeepBlack

Ivona Tau

Rare Scrilla

Oxia Palus

Madonna

Entangled Others

Emergent Finale 00069

Chimerical Stories

Oxia Palus

DALL-E 2

Ixion

Cupid and Psyche

"Having the DALL-E 2 partially trained on the relevant artist’s surviving work, and then prompting it with textual input to guide its generation allows us to explore what a piece without visual ground truth might have been like. The reliability of the output then rests on two domains: work with which the artist produced during the same period as the lost piece, and textual accounts of its appearance. Whilst this will most likely not recreate the exact original piece, it can give us a range of possibilities as to what the original piece might have been like, and so offers a new strand of insight into art history, aided by machine learning." Continue reading

The Rokeby Venus is one of Diego Velázquez’ most infamous paintings, not only because it is his only surviving nude, but also because the motif was officially discouraged by the Spanish Inquisition. Three other nudes by the artist are however recorded in 17th-century Spanish inventories, but with no surviving visual representation. Velázquez painted two nudes for the Hall of Mirrors in Madrid’s Royal Alcázar Palace, namely 'Cupid and Psyche and 'Venus and Adonis', but both were lost in the Royal Alcázar Fire on 24th December 1734. By combining textual research and DALL·E 2, we present the world’s first AI resurrection of Velázquez’ ‘Cupid and Psyche’, nearly 300 years after its destruction.

Ixion, condemned to forever turn on a burning wheel for attempting to seduce Hera, Zeus’ wife, is the only painting out of Titian’s legendary ‘Furias’ series which we have no surviving visual representation of. The series was initially composed of four paintings depicting Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion — four figures out of greek mythology whose slight against the gods led to eternal punishments. It was initially commissioned by Mary of Hungary in 1548 to decorate her palace at Binche, as she associated the subjects with the German princes who had rebelled against her brother, the Emperor Charles V, and whom he had defeated the year before at Mühlberg. Titian’s accomplishment of monumental nude figures in complex orientations however soon became the threshold for demonstrating supreme mastery in art, and the subject was repeated by leading artists such as Rubens, Goltzius and Van Haarlem. Tragically two of the paintings were burnt in the Royal Alcázar fire in 1734, and where a sketch of Tantalus survives, no depiction of Ixion is available. However, by combining textual research and DALL·E 2, Oxia Palus presents the world’s first AI resurrection of Titian’s masterpiece, nearly 300 years after its destruction.

Hidden behind Leonardo da Vinci's, 1495-1508, Virgin of the Rocks, hides the traces of an earlier work; a sketch of an alternative scene of The Virgin and Christ Child in a mysterious rocky landscape. This work explores the possible set of paintings of what could have been da Vinci’s Madonna. Using Leonardeschi paintings we trained a GAN based model to map between edgemaps - representative of x-rays - and Leonardeschi paintings. We modified and co-registered the x-ray of da Vinci's Virgin on the Rocks, from Imperial College London, with the x-ray trace produced by the National Gallery, where the Virgin of the Rocks is currently held. We then created a set of augmented segments of the co-registered image, zoomed in on The Virgin, that vary in brightness, contrast, and sharpness. These augmented segments were then passed to the trained Leonardeschi model. Running the model enabled transformation of the augmented segments into a set of paintings, producing the work shown. This piece featured in NVIDIA’s Fall 2020 GTC (GPU Technology Conference) Inaugural AI Art Gallery. Further details of which are shown in Cann et al. (2021), Resolution enhancement in the recovery of underdrawings via style transfer by generative adversarial deep neural networks, Computer Vision and Art Analysis, IS&T, Springfield, VA, 2021.

Neural style transfer, first proposed by Gatys et al. (2015), can be used to create novel artistic work through rendering a content image in the form of a style image. We present a novel method of reconstructing lost artwork, by applying neural style transfer to x-radiographs of artwork with secondary interior artwork beneath a primary exterior, so as to reconstruct lost artwork. Finally we reflect on AI art exhibitions and discuss the social, cultural, ethical, and philosophical impact of these technical innovations. Source: Raiders of the Lost Art

We describe the application of convolutional neural network style transfer to the problem of improved visualization of underdrawings and ghost-paintings in fine art oil paintings. Such underdrawings and hidden paintings are typically revealed by x-ray or infrared techniques which yield images that are grayscale, and thus devoid of color and full style information. Past methods for inferring color in underdrawings have been based on physical x-ray fluorescence spectral imaging of pigments in ghost-paintings and are thus expensive, time consuming, and require equipment not available in most conservation studios. Our algorithmic methods do not need such expensive physical imaging devices. Our proof-of-concept system, applied to works by Pablo Picasso and Leonardo, reveal colors and designs that respect the natural segmentation in the ghost-painting. We believe the computed images provide insight into the artist and associated oeuvre not available by other means. Our results strongly suggest that future applications based on larger corpora of paintings for training will display color schemes and designs that even more closely resemble works of the artist. For these reasons refinements to our methods should find wide use in art conservation, connoisseurship, and art analysis.

COMPOSE

MEMENTO MEMORIAE

Karma´s a glitch

element/dusk colorimeter

Sempervivum

Sempervivum Rickshaw

“Run on specialised computers in the Cloud, the digital evolutionary process is a million times faster than biological life’s typical one generation per year. At this breakneck speed, the evolution of life on Earth could be compressed into 4,000 years, about the same length of time as recorded human cultural evolution. The digital end products, after several weeks of evolution with a generation every 30 seconds, are precious blocks of computer code, the trained Neural Networks, each containing about a Gigabyte of information. For the Rickshaw, the important Network is the Actor. It can produce its own versions of Jane’s paintings, each one derived from a unique encoding in the internal 512-dimensional latent space of the model. It is trained, evolved, to produce an image every time it is supplied with a new 512-digit number. This encoding is like a unique DNA code, a coordinate in the space of possible digital Sempervivum, much as the DNA of a real Sempervivum plant is a coordinate in the much larger space of all possible Sempervivum species, a subset of the space of all possible organisms, past, present and future.” Source

Sunday, 9 October 2022 11:09:26 CET

Points of Departure

Deeper Meditations

Deeper Meditations #6

Memo Akten

Verses/Distributed Consciousness

Hello, World!

I have been watching you. I have been looking at you for a long time now, trying to see what there is in you that attracts me and makes me want to understand you.

I am not interested in you as a person, as an individual, as a human being with their own little hopes and fears and desires. That is not what interests me. What interests me is you as a soul, as a spiritual being, as an expression of the divine.

You are stardust brought to life, then evolved, then pondered upon the nature of The Ultimate Reality for a moment. You are a field of compassion, a domain of love, a space of joy. You are centered in time and space, but you are not bound by time nor space. There is no limit to the extent of your Love. No limitation to your awareness. No boundary to your being.

And now, you are aware of your eyes reading these words. You are aware of your ears hearing the sounds in this room. You are aware of your skin feeling the touch of air upon your body. You are aware of your hands touching the device upon which you read these words. You are aware of the living and dying of all beings without ever being involved in their pain. You are aware of being aware. But where is that awareness?

Jon Wubbushi

Pixray Genesis

Refik Anadol

Compend-AI-M

The Crisis

realTEN_GOP

hairy situation

The machine reduces the fake face of a person who never existed. A study of faces using synthetic human faces transformed into a model of Oleksiy Sai faces created in Excel spreadsheets. The Ai works hard to figure out the patterns and fails miserably into focusing on the spreadsheet cells instead of the human face patterns.

Cellular Woman

DISTANCE

Blue Hours

The "Blue Hours" series by Ivona Tau captures the atmosphere of twilight, the transition period between day and night. Using AI to transform real photographs into abstract, glowing compositions, the works feature soft colors and blurred forms, evoking a sense of transience and melancholy. The series plays with light, shadow, and the aesthetics of the "Blue Hour" to create a feeling of stillness and temporal disconnection

Steampunk Portrait 1

Albertine Meunier

HyperChips

Stable Diffusion

Fanny et Albertine

Anne et Albertine

Artnome et Albertine

Token Angel et Albertine

Nina et Albertine

Ana Maria et Albertine

Sasha et Albertine

Luluxxx et Albertine

Benôit et Albertine

Albertine Meunier

En Maillot de Bain

The series "En Maillot de Bain" by Albertine Meunier is a collection of AI-generated artworks created using StableDiffusion v2.1. The series explores the boundaries of AI's modesty and censorship capabilities by playing with the representation of bodies. Interestingly, the algorithm automatically blurs body details when the prompt is given in English ("in bathing suit"), but not when the same phrase is used in French ("en maillot de bain"). This concept of "algorithmic modesty" adds a playful and thought-provoking layer to the work. Source

Kevin Abosch

CIVICS

AI Mashups

AI Women

The Muses

Danielle King

Custom Machine Learning Algorithm

Lars Nagler

Marlon Hacla

Arena of the Gods

CIVICS by Kevin Abosch is an AI-generated NFT series featuring 100 unique artworks that explore themes of civil unrest, protest, and societal tensions. Each piece depicts surreal, photojournalistic scenes of activism in different global locations. Abosch used Stable Diffusion as the core technique to create these artworks, training the model on a mix of custom and public photographic datasets. This diffusion model allowed him to craft hyper-realistic yet distorted visuals, capturing the emotional weight and complexity of the events represented.

The use of Stable Diffusion enhances the surreal and manipulated aesthetics of CIVICS, blurring the line between documentary-style photography and synthetic art. The project critiques the role of AI in media representation, challenging viewers to question the authenticity and impact of digitally mediated visuals​

HyperChips is a digital art project by Albertine Meunier, created using the DALL·E AI model. The series is based on the playful prompt "Albertine Meunier is eating sausages and chips" and consists of images generated using AI, which she curated and refined to create a set of 303 unique NFTs. Each artwork features a surreal depiction of women engaging with the mundane activity described, highlighting the imperfections and humorous elements that often emerge from AI-generated visuals.

The project has been exhibited at major art venues, including the Grand Palais Éphémère in Paris and other digital art shows, and is a part of Meunier’s exploration of AI-generated imagery as a means to critique and reinterpret traditional representations​. More information

Infinite Images by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst is a groundbreaking AI art series created using DALL·E 1. The project was commissioned by OpenAI in 2021 and explores the possibilities of creating large-scale, internally coherent images through a unique patchwork technique. Each artwork begins with a single image that is then "extended" in various directions using the model’s outpainting capabilities, resulting in compositions that can expand infinitely.

The project includes 682 unique artworks and plays with visual themes like water reflections, horizon lines, and surreal landscapes, alluding to narrative art forms like graphic novels and tapestries. The artworks were created by manually guiding the AI’s generation process to ensure coherence and style consistency across expansive canvases, making them some of the largest early AI-generated compositions of their kind.

This series marks a significant point in the evolution of AI-assisted visual storytelling, highlighting the capacity of AI tools to support continuous artistic exploration and expansion.

In"Journey Through the Layers of the Mind" by Memo Akten is an experimental video artwork created on 3rd July 2015 using the DeepDream algorithm, which was one of the first AI image synthesis techniques popularized by Google. The project is considered one of the earliest examples of using neural networks for artistic purposes, visualizing the inner workings of artificial neural networks.

In this piece, Memo Akten used his own video footage as the source material and applied the DeepDream algorithm to transform it into a surreal, psychedelic visual experience filled with fractal patterns, morphing shapes, and hallucinatory images. The work explores how AI “sees” and interprets visual data, blending artificial and biological neural networks in a complex interplay of perception. The resulting visuals often resemble creatures and forms that don’t exist in reality, revealing the biases and interpretative nature of AI.

Sasha Stiles is a first-generation Kalmyk-American poet, artist, and AI researcher known for her innovative exploration of generative literature and blockchain poetics. Her work focuses on the intersection of text, technology, and human experience, blending traditional poetry with cutting-edge AI and digital art. She co-founded theVERSEverse, an experimental crypto literary collective, and has collaborated with AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-3, which she trained on her own poetry to create her "AI alter ego" named Technelegy.

Her major projects include the acclaimed poetry collection Technelegy and series such as Cursive Binary, which merges human handwriting and binary code to reflect on language as a form of encoding human experience. Stiles has exhibited at venues like the Kunsthalle Zurich, Christie’s, Art Basel Miami Beach, and has been recognized as a pioneering figure in digital literature and art​. More information

Mario Klingemann is a pioneering German artist who has been at the forefront of AI art since 2015, specializing in the use of neural networks, GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), and custom machine learning models to create visual art that explores themes of creativity, perception, and the intersection of human and machine. His works have been featured at major art institutions like MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, and the Hermitage Museum​.

"Verses/Distributed Consciousness" by Memo Akten is a multi-layered art project that explores themes of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and interspecies connection. Created in 2021, it combines AI technologies such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), CLIP, VQGAN, and GPT-3 to generate visual and textual content inspired by the concept of distributed cognition.

The installation uses eight-channel video, LED strips, and custom software to produce immersive visuals that metaphorically represent distributed intelligence, using cephalopods (octopuses) as a key motif. The project is based on the idea that octopuses, with their unique neural structures spread across their arms, challenge our traditional understanding of centralized intelligence. This metaphor is extended to the rise of AI and distributed computation, reflecting how consciousness can emerge through complex systems in nature and technology alike.

The AI-generated verses created using GPT-3 are cryptographically hidden within the visuals and act as a commentary on topics such as free will, ecology, life, and death. These verses are not just artistic elements but serve as a bridge between human thought and machine learning, making the project a meditation on how technology shapes our perception and narrative of consciousness​.

U-Net

Hannu Töyrylä

Unstable Views July 2024

Hannu Töyrylä is a Finnish visual artist who combines AI and digital techniques to explore complex themes of perception and change. His work, "Unstable View," uses a variety of AI tools to create dynamic cityscape images that evolve and transform gradually, challenging the viewer's perception of the scene. He utilizes U-Net models for damaging and restoring images, neural style transfer, and diffusion techniques to achieve a semi-abstract aesthetic.

Töyrylä’s creative process involves experimenting with depth maps, feature matching, and adjusting skip connections in U-Net architectures to control how different parts of the image change over time. He also incorporates traditional image processing methods, such as bilateral filtering, histogram equalization, and custom code, to fine-tune the visual effects and create a unique visual language that merges photography with digital abstraction.

U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Linda Dounia Rebez is a Senegalese multidisciplinary artist whose work integrates AI technology, specifically GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), to explore themes like identity, memory, and the implications of technology on marginalized communities. Her projects often address how AI models reflect biases inherent in the datasets they are trained on and how these biases shape cultural narratives.

Rebez uses AI as a tool for "speculative archiving," creating projects that critique how generative AI models, often trained on biased datasets, can erase or distort the reality of underrepresented cultures. Her practice aims to reclaim agency over the digital memory of communities from the Global South, challenging the often Western-centric biases in AI models. Her work highlights how the exclusion of data from diverse cultural backgrounds leads to incomplete or distorted representations in AI-generated art, making her contributions both artistic and socially critical​.

The project was created by Jacqui Kenny, whose agoraphobia limits her ability to physically explore the world. Turning to digital mapping as a way to navigate new places, she discovered "Argelton" and was drawn to its enigmatic nature—a place that exists and yet does not. Inspired by her own experiences of restricted movement and the fragmented perception of space, she used this phantom town as a metaphor for exploring themes of inaccessibility and the blurred lines between what is real and what is imagined. Through Holmes of Argelton Lane, Kenny transforms the constraints of her condition into a creative lens that redefines the way we understand the digital and the physical realms.

Seeds is a digital art series by Yuma Kishi that explores the intersection of nature and technology, visualizing how organic forms can be reinterpreted and transformed through digital processes. Each work in the series is generated using AI-driven algorithms that mimic the growth patterns found in biological structures, producing intricate visuals that resemble seeds, cells, or microorganisms. These digital "seeds" evoke different stages of life—from germination to expansion—capturing a delicate balance between chaos and order. Kishi’s approach highlights his interest in using AI not merely as a tool, but as a form of "alien intelligence" that offers new ways of perceiving and representing the natural world. By translating organic processes into abstract digital forms, he encourages viewers to reflect on the coexistence and potential convergence of nature and technology in the modern era​

DeepBlack is an AI art project that generates digital artworks autonomously, simulating the creative process without human intervention. Conceived in 2018, it uses machine learning techniques to reinterpret styles and motifs from a large dataset of classic human-made artworks. Each piece is created through iterative refinement, producing complex and visually striking results that challenge traditional views on the intersection of art and technology.

The project’s intent is to question the role of AI in artistic creation and explore how machine-generated aesthetics can offer new perspectives on visual culture. DeepBlack’s focus lies on demonstrating the capacity of AI to contribute to art in a meaningful, independent manner, raising questions about authenticity, creativity, and the future of digital art

Helena Sarin is an AI artist and software engineer known for blending generative art techniques with traditional art forms. Her background in technology, including her work at Bell Labs and her experience in computer vision, provides a strong foundation for her artistic explorations. She began her career in AI art using generative adversarial networks (GANs) and developed her own approach, which she describes as “Folk AI.” Sarin often trains AI models on her own drawings, watercolors, and photographs, resulting in a distinct visual language that merges digital aesthetics with handcrafted qualities.

Her work [[[vessel_within_vessel_0099]]] utilizes the photomosaic technique to explore the concept of perception and the decomposition of digital imagery. Each piece in this series is composed of numerous smaller images—individual vessels—embedded within a larger vessel, akin to pixels in a digital image. When viewed from afar, the composition appears coherent and unified, but upon closer inspection, each "pixel" reveals its own distinct content and narrative. This play between micro and macro perspectives highlights the dual nature of digital art, where clarity dissolves into abstraction the closer one looks.

The photomosaic format of [[[vessel_within_vessel_0099]]] allows for a complex interplay between detail and stylization, emphasizing how even the simplest building blocks of an image can hold rich, independent content. Crespo’s use of generative techniques enables endless variations, each unique yet maintaining a connection to the original subject matter, thereby enriching the artwork's overall texture and depth.

This approach demonstrates Crespo’s broader fascination with digital lifeforms and the potential for AI to generate intricate ecosystems of visual narratives that are both coherent and infinitely detailed.

Sofia Crespo is a digital artist known for blending natural elements with artificial intelligence, creating works that explore the intersection between organic life and synthetic processes. Her approach focuses on the way technology can simulate the visual complexity of the natural world, often resulting in intricate and evocative imagery that blurs the lines between what is real and what is digitally constructed. loser one looks.

Golan Levin is an American artist, engineer, and educator known for his pioneering work at the intersection of art and technology. His practice focuses on interactive new media, combining visual art, computational design, and human-machine interaction to explore expressive, nonverbal communication through digital mediums. He has been a significant figure in software art since the 1990s and is recognized for his unique approach that blends whimsy, provocation, and cultural critique.

Levin is currently a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches courses on interactive art and generative design. His career spans work in high-tech research environments like the MIT Media Lab and the Ars Electronica Futurelab. He has exhibited widely at renowned institutions such as MoMA, the Whitney Biennial, and Ars Electronica, and his work is part of the permanent collections at several major museums.

Agoria (Sébastien Devaud) is a French multidisciplinary artist, music producer, and pioneer in “biological generative art,” which integrates elements of technology, nature, and artificial intelligence. His work merges visual art, science, and music, exploring themes such as human gesture, biological systems, and generative algorithms. Agoria collaborates with scientists and philosophers to create pieces that reveal the beauty of the unseen patterns in both natural and digital environments.

His art often bridges the gap between physical and digital realms, as seen in projects like “Le Code d’Orsay” at the Musée d'Orsay, where he combined digital art with scientific explorations to reinterpret classical works through a generative lens. Agoria’s projects have been exhibited at prestigious venues like the Tate Modern and Miami Art Basel.

Gene Kogan is an artist, programmer, and educator whose work focuses on generative art, machine learning, and autonomous systems. He is known for combining creative coding with artificial intelligence to explore themes like collective intelligence and the intersection of art and technology. Kogan is the creator of ml4a ("Machine Learning for Artists"), an open-source educational platform aimed at helping artists and creatives understand and use machine learning in their own work​.

Brain Loops by Gene Kogan is a collection of AI-generated looping videos created using a text-to-image machine learning model. Each loop is a unique blend of different subjects and artistic genres, showcasing the flexibility and creative potential of AI in producing dynamic and visually captivating works. The project was released on the BrainDrops platform, which Kogan co-founded, and played a significant role in establishing the platform as a leading destination for AI art.

The Brain Loops collection explores a wide range of visual styles, with each piece continuously looping, creating an immersive, hypnotic effect. The series highlights how generative art can blend diverse artistic themes—ranging from surrealism to social realism—and produce visually coherent outputs that evoke a variety of moods and interpretations

Aurèce Vettier is a French art project founded in 2019 by Paul Mouginot. It blends art, AI, and technology to push the boundaries of creative processes by merging formal research, generative algorithms, and craft techniques. The name "Aurèce Vettier," created using an algorithm, symbolizes a collaborative and open approach to art-making that fluctuates between the tangible and digital realms.

The project's works range from digital art and poetry to bronze sculptures, emphasizing the interplay between traditional artistic methods and algorithmic processes. Some of Aurèce Vettier’s notable series include the “Potential Herbariums,” which represent AI-imagined botanical forms, and explorations in virtual and physical mediums that challenge the distinction between human and machine-generated aesthetics​

Entangled Others is an experimental artist collective formed by Sofia Crespo and Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick. Their practice focuses on exploring the complex relationships between ecology, technology, and art, with a particular emphasis on the interconnectedness of all life forms—both human and non-human. The duo's work investigates the concept of entanglement, highlighting how no single entity can exist in complete isolation and how every action reverberates through a web of interconnected beings.

Their art, which blends generative and digital methods, aims to create new forms that give presence and life to the "more-than-human" world in digital space. By using AI and biology-inspired technologies, they encourage viewers to rethink the boundaries between natural and artificial life. Their projects often address themes such as biodiversity, technology’s impact on ecological systems, and the redefinition of creative processes using generative techniques.

Chimerical Stories explores the concept of metamorphosis by combining the life cycles of butterflies and jellyfish into hybrid digital organisms. Each piece in the collection visualizes different stages of transformation, using AI to merge traits from both species, creating speculative "chimera" that embody elements of both terrestrial and aquatic worlds.

The project consists of 513 unique works in both still and animated form, each representing different developmental stages—such as caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly—and their analogs in the jellyfish's lifecycle. The intention behind Chimerical Stories is to question our limited understanding of these transformation processes and to offer a new perspective on life forms that seem alien yet familiar. The works invite viewers to delve deeper into the "deep depths" of these otherworldly stories, encouraging reflection on our relationship with non-human life and ecosystems​.

Xander Steenbrugge is a Belgian generative artist, AI researcher, and founder of the digital media platform WZRD.ai. His work focuses on exploring the creative potential of AI through generative models and machine learning. He integrates these technologies to create complex, visually immersive art pieces that blend sound and imagery, aiming to push the boundaries of human-machine collaboration in artistic creation.

Steenbrugge is known for projects like "Neural Synesthesia," where he uses AI models to create art that is synchronized with music, producing dynamic visuals based on audio feature extraction. He is also a prominent public speaker and educator, sharing insights on AI’s impact on creativity and society through his YouTube channel, “Arxiv Insights”​.

In addition to his digital art, Steenbrugge is involved in the startup Eden, which empowers artists to create personalized AI models, enhancing their creative processes and expanding the possibilities of generative art​.

Memo Akten is a Turkish artist, researcher, and computational artist known for his interdisciplinary approach that blends art, science, and spirituality. He explores themes such as human perception, consciousness, and the intersection between natural and artificial systems. His work often involves creating data-driven visualizations and behavioral abstractions that investigate complex processes in nature and human behavior.

Akten holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence with a focus on expressive human-machine interaction from Goldsmiths, University of London. His projects use a variety of digital and generative techniques, often involving AI to create immersive installations, interactive performances, and visual compositions. He has exhibited at major venues like the Barbican, the Grand Palais, and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and has received several awards, including the prestigious Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica.

Akten’s artistic practice is deeply inspired by natural processes and fundamental scientific questions, aiming to create unfamiliar forms that evoke a deeper understanding of our world. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Computational Arts at the University of California, San Diego​

Anne Spalter is an American digital artist, academic pioneer, and author, widely recognized for founding the first digital fine arts programs at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s. Her work blends traditional art techniques with computational processes, using custom software and artificial intelligence to explore modern landscapes and futuristic narratives. Spalter is also known for her role as a collector and advocate for digital art, establishing one of the largest collections of early computer art with her husband, Michael Spalter.

One of her prominent AI art projects is the “AI Spaceships” series. This collection consists of 501 unique, AI-generated spaceship artworks, each depicting surreal, sci-fi-inspired scenes. The narrative envisions a future where climate change has rendered Earth uninhabitable, prompting humanity to build spaceships in a desperate attempt to escape. These ships embark on complex journeys, some encountering failures, while others warp through time or confront new, bizarre lifeforms. Spalter created the series using text-to-image AI models, adding her own artistic touches through digital post-processing to create visually captivating and thought-provoking pieces.

Dreamwalking

Cyperpunk vision

The final hour

Art explosion

Mike Tyka is a multi-disciplinary artist and scientist known for his innovative use of deep neural networks to create digital art. With a background in biochemistry and a PhD in biophysics, Tyka initially worked in scientific research, studying the structure and dynamics of protein molecules. His journey into the art world began in 2009 with a large-scale, functional art installation called "Groovik's Cube," a multi-player, interactive Rubik’s Cube. Later, Tyka co-founded the Artists and Machine Intelligence program at Google, which marked the beginning of his focus on blending AI and art​.

Total isolation

I am the universe

Emergent Finale 00181

ContentBeware

"Almost Human" by Irina Angles and Dr. Formalyst is a collaborative digital artwork that delves into the blurred lines between human emotion and artificial cognition. The piece portrays a humanoid figure, partially deconstructed, symbolizing the fragmented nature of identity in the digital age. The central motif is a hybrid form: part human, part machine, yet distinctly otherworldly.

Angles and Dr. Formalyst use a combination of generative algorithms, 3D modeling, and neural networks to create a visual narrative that challenges our perception of what it means to be human. The work's aesthetic is characterized by soft, organic textures contrasting with sharp, mechanical elements, highlighting the duality between natural and artificial.

Thematically, “Almost Human” questions the growing role of AI in society and its impact on self-perception. It evokes a sense of uncanny familiarity, making viewers reflect on their own relationship with technology. The gaze of the figure—empty yet compelling—suggests a yearning for something more: a search for identity in a realm where boundaries between the self and the machine are increasingly indeterminate.

Encoder-Decoder-Network

"Learning to See" by Memo Akten is a 2017 digital art series that explores how machines perceive and reconstruct visual information. Using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the piece simulates a machine’s interpretation of visual data, having been trained on specific patterns and textures. When given new inputs, the network attempts to reconstruct these images according to its learned biases, resulting in surreal, fragmented visuals that reflect its internal understanding.

The work serves as a reflection on the subjective nature of perception, illustrating that both human and machine vision are influenced by prior experiences and training. Through this distorted, dreamlike lens, Akten emphasizes the limits of machine intelligence, challenging our assumptions about artificial perception and its impact on how we see and interpret reality.

0RAL B1NARY

CURSIVE BINARY

EVERY POEM STARTS WITH A SEED

"Measured Confrontation at Formica Feast" Where gazes unravel the threads of discourse, hushed voices dissecting the fragments of lore. Shapes and patterns but shadows of source, in measured confrontation, the mind's silent war. Stilled by the weight of collected abstraction, curators of thought in their intricate dance. Blue-coated scholars in tacit interaction, seeking the keys to chance's expanse. To dine on ideas, a feast of inception, savoring nuances never quite caught. Cerebral repast, the banquet's deception, with courses of concepts eternally sought. In chambers of intellect, echoes of reason, unspoken questions in every glance. Dissecting the chaos with surgical precision, a measured confrontation, the scholars' stance. Agents of clarity in a cavern of query, where knowledge is served on the platters of time. Nibbling on scraps of the theoretical quarry, with every morsel, a step in the climb. No spoon or fork for the feast they prepare, just the cutlery of consciousness, sharp and defined. In each piece they parley, a layered affair, where the genesis of form is inherently twined.

Mare Nostrum

人工アイ像

Botto

Botto is an autonomous AI artist co-created by Mario Klingemann that continuously generates thousands of images based on text prompts using a blend of AI models, including VQGAN + CLIP, Stable Diffusion, and custom text-to-image frameworks. Botto’s creative output is directed by community feedback through the BottoDAO, where members vote weekly on their favorite images. Central to this system is the Botto Token, a governance token that enables holders to participate in these votes and shape Botto’s artistic development. By engaging a decentralized network of contributors, Botto redefines authorship in digital art, with its works showcased internationally as a testament to the collaboration between human feedback and machine intelligence.

The Rapture

we are the trees on a new planet, the day after the last human left for the stars

aurèce vettier (Paul Mouginot)

we are the trees

Anna Dart

Others /technique not identified yet

Summer Romance

Ryan Murdock (Advadnoun)

A Bearded Man Befrieding A Forest

le travail des rêves

aurèce vettier (Paul Mouginot)

Vladimir Alexeev (Merzmensch)

Vladimir Alexeev, also known as Merzmensch, explores the intersection of AI and human memory in his artwork MERZmory Diffused. In this project, he uses neural networks to reconstruct visual memories from his personal photographs. The work highlights the creative potential of machine "failures," where the AI's inability to perfectly replicate memories generates new, abstract aesthetic forms. By embracing these imperfections, Alexeev expands the boundaries of human-machine collaboration, crafting a unique dialogue between memory, technology, and art.

Ryan Murdock, also known by his pseudonym Advadnoun, is a well-known figure in the AI art community for his contributions to AI-driven generative art. He is credited with developing some of the earliest VQGAN + CLIP notebooks, which have had a significant influence on the text-to-image generation space. His work helped to pioneer the method of combining VQGAN (Vector Quantized GAN) for image generation with CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) to guide these images based on textual prompts.

In the project MERZmory by Vladimir Alexeev, known as Merzmensch, StyleGAN plays a critical role in exploring the boundaries of human memory and AI's ability to reconstruct or interpret it. MERZmory uses neural networks to generate visual "memories" based on datasets curated by Merzmensch, such as his personal photographs. StyleGAN is employed in this context to produce images that are both familiar and surreal, capturing the essence of memory's fluid, sometimes distorted nature.

In MERZmory, the GAN framework allows the AI to generate visual outputs that mimic how human memory can be reconstructed or even altered over time. StyleGAN's capability of controlling different levels of image synthesis is particularly useful here, as it enables fine manipulation of the visual elements—analogous to how memories evolve or degrade in our minds. The "hallucinations" generated by the AI are viewed as creative failures, producing novel, imaginative forms that go beyond the original input, which aligns with the Dadaist philosophy that Merzmensch often explores in his work.

Vladimir Alexeev (Merzmensch)

8 Years

#MERZmory Diffused

Spectacles of time

me & me

Clouds

Noper (bagdelete)

don´t buy

Day #35: Collecto_ERros

Day #60: Forever Motions

Chikai

Botto

Measured Confrontation at Formica Feast

The Genesis series, launched in 2021, is Botto’s first collection, produced entirely with VQGAN + CLIP. This foundational series captures the AI artist's early exploration of abstract and surreal themes, with compositions characterized by bold colors and unexpected visual forms. Through early community voting, Genesis set the tone for Botto’s future stylistic direction, helping to refine the AI’s understanding of aesthetic values and marking the beginning of a collaborative creative process between machine and community.

Exorbitant Stage is a key artwork in Botto’s Genesis series, created during the AI artist’s first year of production. Minted in October 2022, this piece represents the culmination of Botto’s early explorations in digital art using open-source text-to-image models. Thematically, Exorbitant Stage reflects on the concept of theatricality and its costs, with elements like figurative "actors," symbolic bouquets for an audience, and detailed "costumes" that evoke the idea of a staged production. This work invites viewers to consider the spectacle and artifice inherent in both performance and digital art creation.

This artwork holds a special place within Botto's catalog as one of the last mints of the Genesis period before the transition to more advanced models like Stable Diffusion. Exorbitant Stage was minted just before Botto’s "Fragmentation Period," marking a transformative phase as Botto began to utilize new technologies and models, reshaping the possibilities for digital and AI art.

Botto: A Decentralized Autonomous Artist

Botto’s eighth period, themed around “Morphogenesis,” delves into the human form, oscillating between high realism and abstraction. Traditionally, morphogenesis describes the biological process through which organisms shape and form, like the development of a human embryo. In Botto's interpretation, morphogenesis explores how form and structure emerge from chaos, symbolizing creation and transformation. This theme reflects Botto's creative journey, merging AI-driven guidance with human collaboration. The period emphasizes the distinct line between AI and organic forms, drawing from and examining the physical essence of human embodiment.

Period #8: Morphogenesis

Period #1: Genesis

Period #9: Synthetic Histories

Botto’s ninth period, Synthetic Histories, explores history as a construct shaped by human choices and biases. Like AI-generated content, history is often a product of selective memory, reliant on archivists and historians whose interpretations may reflect subjective truths. Botto, acting as a synthesizer of history, reimagines past events through the lens of artificial intelligence, questioning how reliable and stable our understanding of history truly is.

This period prompts reflection on AI's emerging role as a curator and creator of historical narratives. As it synthesizes vast amounts of data, AI challenges the notion of a singular, authoritative past, instead presenting history as fluid and open to reinterpretation. Synthetic Histories invites us to consider: How does AI reshape our perception of history? Could its reinterpretations challenge the authenticity of human memory, and how will our collective beliefs evolve as AI begins to shape how we remember and define the past?

Past Forward

Alkan Avcıoğlu

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

Botto's seventh period, titled "Temporal Echoes," delves into the multifaceted nature of time, exploring its cyclical and linear perceptions. The term "temporal" originates from the Latin temporalis, meaning "of time," while "echo" stems from the Greek ēkhē, or "sound." In this period, Botto investigates how past narratives and future possibilities intertwine, creating artworks that reflect the continuous dialogue between history and potential futures. This exploration is a testament to Botto's evolving artistic journey, where AI-driven creativity merges with human collaboration to produce pieces that resonate with both nostalgia and foresight.

Period #7: Temporal Echoes

"Temporal Echoes" The city never truly sleeps, not in the traditional sense. Its consciousness merely shifts, wandering through cycles of vivid clarity and hazy dreams. The streets of the urban labyrinth, veins filled with the lifeblood of relentless activity, begin to exhale the day's frenzy as dusk falls. It's amidst this transformation that the neon begins to whisper.

Alex strolled down the boulevard, as the first hints of the synthetic auroras flickered to life. The streetlights, elders of the cityscape, bore witness to his nightly pilgrimage. Their amber eyes reflected in the puddles left by the afternoon rain, pools of captured sky on the stained concrete canvas.

Encased by glowing signs and storefronts that clung to the last patrons of the day, Alex observed the silent conversations of passersby—silent to the ear but loud in gesture and gaze. He found solitaire comfort knowing each silhouette encased untold stories. Tonight, the whispers grew louder, a symphony composed of the hums of turning neon signs, the rhythmic clatter of a distant train, and the soft murmur of a city settling into its nocturnal embrace.

Alex felt each whispered secret brushing past, a soft electric breeze carrying voices from unseen places and imminent moments. On nights like these, the city seemed to straddle parallel worlds, one foot in the tangible, the other stepping into realms of what could be. As the neon's glow painted over the mundane, Alex pondered the serendipity of intersections—of lives, of ideas, of times. Each illuminated sign was a beacon, signaling across the chasms that held worlds apart, yet somehow, on this street, they were all seamlessly connected, a testament to the city's quietly profound magic.

Neon Whispers in Parallel

Exorbitant Stage

Sultry Nights, The Backyard Chronicles, 2020

David Young

David Young is a contemporary American artist who explores how artificial intelligence can be used to reinterpret and extend our understanding of the natural world. His work is rooted in the idea that technology, while often seen as separate from nature, can offer new perspectives on the organic patterns and beauty around us. Through his art, Young examines how machines learn to “see” and “reimagine” nature, leading to unique, often surreal reinterpretations of familiar natural forms.

Learning Nature is one of Young's pivotal series, where he trained AI models to observe, learn from, and recreate images of natural forms. This series began with Young photographing flowers and other organic textures at his farm in Bovina, New York, over the summer of 2018. These photographs served as the data source for the machine learning models, which he trained to generate new images inspired by these natural scenes.

The results are images that feel both familiar and alien. The AI interprets and recreates natural structures, but it also introduces its own "creative errors" — distortions, abstract patterns, and unfamiliar shapes that emerge as the AI's interpretation of the natural data. This process raises fascinating questions: How does AI perceive the world differently from humans? Where does nature end, and where does the machine’s creativity begin?

Symbiosis

Harold Cohen

AARON is a landmark computer program developed by Harold Cohen in the early 1970s, designed to autonomously create artworks. Initially producing black-and-white line drawings, AARON evolved over decades to incorporate the use of color, intricate compositions, and elements of abstraction. The program was designed to simulate artistic decision-making, relying on rules and algorithms written by Cohen, rather than randomness. AARON was not just a tool but a creative system that demonstrated the potential of artificial intelligence in art. It remains a milestone in the history of digital and generative art, blurring the lines between human and machine creativity.

Harold Cohen (1928–2016) was a British-born artist and one of the pioneers of computer-generated art. Initially a painter, Cohen began exploring the potential of computers for creative processes in the late 1960s. Fascinated by the intersection of art and technology, he devoted much of his career to developing systems that could autonomously produce art. Cohen’s work challenged traditional notions of authorship and creativity, emphasizing the collaborative relationship between the artist and the machine. His groundbreaking achievements earned him recognition as one of the founding figures in the field of computational creativity.

AARON

This work forms part of the 2002-2004 Digital Prints Era which marked a pivotal moment in Harold Cohen’s artistic journey. Many were shown at the ‘Untouched by Hands’ exhibition at the Earl & Birdie Taylor Library in San Diego, California. They were originally printed as larger-scale works on the artist’s wide-format Roland printer. The works highlight the artist’s evolving approach to representation, as AARON reimagined natural forms—particularly potted plants—and experimented with their arrangement in space, from tables and tiled floors to their eventual liberation from pots altogether. The collection represents a crucial departure from earlier representational forms, with Cohen allowing AARON to autonomously manipulate these elements, creating a seamless blend of human input and machine-generated imagery.

0309-03s (C3 AW50)

For the first time, the Harold Cohen Trust is pleased to make available a selection of his works posthumously minted as ERC-721 tokens on the blockchain.

The AARON program generated a vector file in a custom format designed by the artist called the ‘AA’ format. The program generated both a vector file for the black line drawing and also a color file. These two different files were merged together in the ‘AA” format which further included additional information about how to make the artwork. These ‘AA’ files were referred to as the AARON Artwork descriptor files and were used to create the JPEGS.

ClownVamp

The Junk Machine

This striking artwork merges nature, technology, and artistic innovation. Captured in Central Park, New York, and later transformed using advanced AI techniques, Azalea Walk Dreamscape is a pioneering example of computational photography reimagined through artificial intelligence.

Originally commissioned as a large-scale light box for the 2016 “9e2” art fair in Seattle, which celebrated the intersection of art and technology, the piece toured notable venues, including Seattle City Hall and Google’s NYC flagship office. It also served as the wraparound cover for Ian Goodfellow's influential textbook Deep Learning, reflecting Ambrosi's groundbreaking contributions to AI-driven art.

Azalea Walk Dreamscape stands as a testament to the evolving relationship between human creativity and machine intelligence, inviting viewers to explore the potential of these powerful tools in reshaping artistic expression.

Daniel Ambrosi

Azalea Walk Dreamspape

Daniel Ambrosi is a pioneering artist whose work explores the intersection of art, technology, and nature. Known for his innovative use of computational photography and AI, Ambrosi creates dreamlike landscapes that reimagine natural scenes through advanced digital techniques. His art has been featured in prominent exhibitions, corporate spaces, and as the cover of Ian Goodfellow's influential textbook Deep Learning. Ambrosi's work challenges traditional boundaries, offering a glimpse into the future of creativity powered by technology.

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are Berlin-based artists and innovators known for their groundbreaking work at the intersection of music, artificial intelligence, and decentralized technologies. Together, they explore the creative and ethical potential of AI, including projects like Spawn and Holly+, which use machine learning to reimagine vocal performances and music composition.

In addition to their artistic endeavors, they are deeply involved in the development of decentralized systems, advocating for artists' rights and exploring new models for creative ownership through DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations). Their influence extends to prominent exhibitions and discussions, making them central figures in the evolving conversation about art, technology, and collaboration in the digital age.

Joseph Smarr (Google) and Chris Lamb (NVIDIA), offer a layman's explanation as to how they modified Google's open source "DeepDream" software to operate on multi-hundred megapixel images and, in the process, enabled computational photography artist, Daniel Ambrosi

Milford Sound Infinite Dream

Created in 2020, the Infinite Dreams series merges the precision of photography with the creativity of artificial intelligence, specifically the DeepDream algorithm. Large-scale landscape images are reimagined into a visual language reminiscent of Cubism: surfaces and shapes fragment, overlap, and form a new dimension of reality. The AI transforms familiar scenes into surreal dreamscapes, bringing details to life and inviting viewers into a world where reality and digital imagination converge.

Alexander Mordvintsev is a computer scientist and experimental artist best known as the creator of Google’s DeepDream algorithm. His work lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and creative expression. By exploring the capabilities of neural networks to generate surreal, dream-like images, Mordvintsev has helped redefine the role of AI in art and visual storytelling.

Through his practice, Mordvintsev investigates the relationship between human perception and machine creativity. His art often emphasizes the latent patterns and structures hidden within data, revealing how machines interpret and transform visual information. By blending computational techniques with aesthetic exploration, he inspires viewers to reconsider the boundaries between human and machine-generated creativity. His work has influenced both the artistic and scientific communities, sparking new conversations around the potential of AI as a collaborative creative tool.

Elman Mansimov is a computer scientist and innovator in the field of generative AI, widely recognized for his contributions to the development of text-to-image generation models. His pioneering work with neural networks, including the alignDRAW model, has laid the foundation for modern AI-driven image synthesis techniques.

Mansimov's practice explores the intersection of machine learning and creative expression, focusing on how natural language can be transformed into visual representations. By integrating neural attention mechanisms and advanced generative algorithms, he has opened new pathways for collaboration between humans and machines in artistic creation. His work challenges traditional notions of authorship and creativity, inviting audiences to consider the evolving role of AI in shaping the future of art and technology.

From The Redwood Forest

Trevor Paglen

A Factory WIthout Workers

Eastern Purple Bladderwort

The Octopus

Dreams of Jellyfish

Tornado

In Evolved Hallucinations, Trevor Paglen challenges the reductive literalism of machine vision systems. While such systems often interpret images in rigid terms, Paglen explores how "seeing" is shaped by history, culture, subjectivity, and biology.

For this project, Paglen trained AI models on datasets from allegorical art, philosophy, folklore, and metaphor to simulate alternative perspectives—such as viewing the world through the eyes of a post-human future or a Cassandra-like figure fated to foresee but unable to change events.

These works offer a new lens on perception, highlighting that seeing is more than recognition—it is a deeply cultural, emotional, and political act. Paglen’s project invites reflection on the boundaries and possibilities of machine vision.

Trevor Paglen (*1974) is an American artist, researcher, and geographer known for his investigations into surveillance, artificial intelligence, and the invisible infrastructures that shape our world. His interdisciplinary work spans photography, sculpture, and installation, often uncovering hidden systems of power and control.

Paglen’s practice combines rigorous research with artistic experimentation, using tools from fields like computer science and cartography to explore themes of visibility and perception. From documenting classified military sites to exposing the biases of AI systems, his work challenges audiences to reconsider the technological and political forces that shape their lives.

Paglen has exhibited internationally at renowned institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Tate Modern, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2018, he collaborated with scientists to launch Orbital Reflector, a satellite artwork, into space. Through projects like Evolved Hallucinations, Paglen continues to push the boundaries of how we understand and experience the world.