AI Retrospective

AI RETROSPECTIVE

This is a reverse chronological retrospective of AI art that I have been collecting since 2021 when I first started collecting NFTs. This curation is not meant to be a comprehensive review of important artists in the AI art space, but it is a curation that reflects my personal aesthetics and what I have been genuinely drawn to as a collector. It captures key points in my journey collecting AI art and takes particular note of collections and artists that truly changed my view of AI art.

POST PHOTOGRAPHY

I'll start this retrospective with one of my most recent acquisitions, "Grand Opening" by Roope Rainisto from his collection "Life in West America". This collection has truly brought Post Photography to the forefront and I believe it will be looked back upon as a historic work in the emerging field of AI art.

This piece as well as Roope's overall collection made me reflect on what AI art I have collected over the years and I realized that I have actually been fairly active since the very beginning of my NFT journey in both buying AI art and engaging with AI artists.

Roope's work is ground breaking and stunning. He has received a lot of attention recently, which I think he totally deserves, if not more, but there are many other artists who are experimenting in this new field of Post Photography that I truly love. Here are a few of my other acquisitions from emerging artists in this field (Gordey Prostov, Karina Kedrina, Mia Forrest, Anna Condo, Anders Brasch-Willumsen)

AI COLLABORATIVE

The next key phase that really changed my perspective on AI art (remember I'm going reverse chronologically) is AI Collaborative. The term was really brought into the lexicon by Claire Silver, one of the leading artists and advocates for AI art. She also created what I would call the defining collection for AI Collaborative, "AI Art is Not Art". I was lucky enough to get two pieces from this collection on secondary fairly soon after mint. They are among my favorite pieces in my collection.

Claire Silver's "AI Art is Not Art" was minted on August 2022 and since then there has been an extraordinary number of artists who have started to experiment and produce some amazing work. One particular category of artists who have really adopted AI into their practice are photographers. As much as AI seems so far apart from photography, they are actually very similar in many ways and have similar biases against them. Photography is more than just a click. AI is more than just a prompt. Photography is a taking pictures of the real world. AI is taking pictures of the human imagination.

Here are several pieces that I have collected from photographers who have combined their AI experiments with their photography experience to create some very compelling work that expands what you might think of as AI art. For the most part, these pieces were minted after Claire Silver's "AI Art is Not Art" collection and were largely influenced by how Claire was pushing the medium. I think these pieces were the progenitor to the Post Photography movement. (Grace Almera, Synchrodogs, Natalie Shau)

But photographers were not the only artists who have been experimenting and using AI in their work. In the past couple months a very diverse set of artists have begun to release some beautiful captivating work from CG artists to illustrators to painters to fashion designers. (0009, Lilyillo, cubes, Haze Long, S)

FROM THE COLLECTION OF CHIKAI (ACQUIRED 2021-2023)

AI

This phase I feel was the biggest leap from a technology standpoint that really opened my eyes to what AI could potentially become as an art form. I'm calling this phase "AI" because the key change was in the technology.

The most impactful collection of the AI phase in my opinion is "Explosions of Color" by AIIV (collaboration by Ravi Vora and Phil Bosua) that launched in September 2021. It had a clear artistic focus and it used GAN at a scale I had not seen before. It is the one that I believe set in motion much of the sophistication in AI art we see today especially from an artistic perspective.

When it first launched, the collection took off so suddenly and skyrocketed in the secondary market that I was quickly out-priced and I could not get one at the time. But as I was doing research for this retrospective, I saw that the floor had become very affordable, so I picked up "Explosion of Color #34" because I believe it to be a collection of historical importance.

The "Explosions of Color" collection was only 100 pieces, so after seeing the huge demand for the collection AIIV (Ravi Vora and Phil Bosua) launched a follow-on collection called "Singularity" which was a 1000 pieces collection, which I was able to afford and buy on secondary after it launched.

After "Explosions of Colors" launched, AI took an interesting turn and the focus became an app called "Dream" by Wombo. It was one of the first prompt based AI tools that came out and it was very rudimentary as compared to today's prompt based tools like DALL-E and MidJourney. But it captured the public attention in a big way and enflamed the heated debate of whether AI was art or not that continues to this day and this debate is what the title of Claire Silver's historic AI Collaborative art collection references.

But there was one more notable AI collection around this time period and I'd say it was a harbinger to the AI Collaborative movement. In January of 2022, Cath Simard, Ryan Newburn, and Iurie Belegurschi collaborated with AI to create a 2555 piece collection of AI generated landscapes called "The Metascapes" that used their world-class landscape photography as the training data for the AI. It was fascinating to see the results and I think it is an important collection in the development of AI as an art form.

I was lucky enough to get a few on the mint and also host the Metascapes team in a Twitter Space when they launched, which was truly an honor.

GAN

Generative adversarial network (GAN) is the machine learning framework that is used to generate images in these AI systems. When it first came into existence there were a group of artists who were among the very first to use this technology like Robbie Barrat and Pindar van Arman. There were also several online GAN tools like Ganbrood, but many were installing custom instances on their own servers.

I think many gravitate toward the very first to create art with GAN because of their historic significance, but many of their works did not fit my personal aesthetics, so I didn't buy their pieces at the time, plus many were already too expensive for my budget as I was just starting to collect NFTs.

But I did find artists who were using GAN in really innovative ways that I truly connected with. The most important artist for me was Jenni Pasanen because she got me to fall in love with AI art for the first time and not just appreciate it intellectually. Jenni was also one of the very first artists I connected with in the NFT community. We were both starting our journeys into the NFT world and serendipitously became friends. Unfortunately, I didn't end up collecting her pieces during that time period until much later on secondary, but I was lucky enough to get one of the pieces from her collaboration with Reuben Wu.