AI Art
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst - Infinite Images ∞
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst's collaborative work explores power dynamics through AI and virtual ecosystems. Their practice, which includes public performances, music, and a podcast, advocates for vocal sovereignty and protections for artists while exploring new forms of media mimicry. In 2021, Herndon and Dryhurst were invited by OpenAI to work with the DALL-E 1 research model as part of a commission. “Infinite Images” are the product of these experiments, large images meticulously constructed piece by piece to explore the models capacity for coherence. This context hints at why themes of reflection in water and glass, horizon lines and mountain ranges appear so frequently, as the works were constructed by playing an exquisite corpse game with the model. A single initial generation could now be infinitely expanded upon in any direction. To the duo's knowledge, these are the only artworks produced with the original DALL-E model. They represent a transitional phase from the more abstract generations of the models that preceded it, and the high fidelity models we are used to today.
Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst - Minnesang
Created for Bright Moments Tokyo, Minnesang is a long-form AI-generated NFT series that extends Herndon and Dryhurst's 2015 musical play, Minnesang: A Tale of Bits and Atoms. It generates character portraits to complement the musical's AI-generated music. The inspiration for the series comes from the historic Codex Manesse, the single most comprehensive source of Middle High German Minnesang poetry, written and illustrated between 1304 and 1340. This NFT series adds visual depth to the play’s thematic exploration of data wars.
Refik Anadol - Winds of Yawanawa
Refik Anadol is a Turkish-American new media artist and designer. His projects consist of data-driven machine learning algorithms that create abstract, dream-like environments. This NFT series is the first iteration of the Possible Futures initiative. Anadol was commissioned to collaborate with artists from the Yawanawá Sacred Village in Brazil’s Acre state. The digital artworks in Winds of Yawanawá reflect Yawanawá culture and the surrounding rainforest by integrating real-time weather data from the Amazon. The project features the artwork of young Yawanawá sisters Nawashahu and Mukashahu, combined with traditional chants. This data-driven piece dynamically evolves, representing the Yawanawá identity and their vital connection to the Amazon.
Rachel Maclean - DUCK
Rachel Maclean is an artist known for her digital videos that often utilize green-screen technology. Her films blend references from popular culture, including children’s TV, horror, British comedy, video games, and YouTube. Maclean’s work strikingly contrasts seductive visuals with unsettling themes, exposing darker realities beneath her vibrant, fantastical narratives. Maclean's debut deepfake film, DUCK, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Sean Connery, immerses viewers in a world of artifice and intrigue within an AI-generated landscape. This 16-minute film uniquely employs deepfake technology to resurrect these iconic actors through machine learning, chronicling Connery’s descent into chaos after witnessing Monroe's return from the dead. Visually captivating, funny, and technically innovative, DUCK takes elements from classic Hollywood, video games, film noir, and sci-fi to raise compelling questions about truth and power. This NFT is one of 20 scenes from the short film, and features three generations of James Bond in the same car, having a heated discussion as the film approaches its explosive – both figurative and literal – high.
Roope Rainisto - Vacation
Roope Rainisto is an artist, designer, and photographer who is pioneering innovative applications of AI-based generative methods for post-photographic expression. His work explores the boundaries between the real and the virtual. By using AI to create the Vacation series, Rainisto calls attention to the artificiality of photography itself. He explains, “In my mind photography has always been about the real and the unreal. Photos are not real. They're 2D pieces of paper. We have this cultural acceptance, shared norms to consider them real.” By blurring the boundaries between real and unreal: authentic and fake, Rainisto hopes that new technologies will foster skepticism and criticality, interrogating the idea of the photograph as an objective source of truth.
Roope Rainisto - Aura
Aura is a collection of 100 high resolution AI-generated portraits, exploring the boundaries of realism versus imagination. It asks "How far can a portrait image be deconstructed while a sense of humanity and emotion still remains?”
Roope Rainisto - Life in West America
Life In West America investigates America as a concept and as an ideal. The collection combines the visual language of traditional photography with the limitless artifice of AI. Rainisto intentionally leaves the imperfections the current implementations of AI create in the art, making each piece a snapshot of the shortcomings of technology at this moment in time. For the creation of the 500 images in the collection, roughly 35,000 images were initially generated, after which approximately 15,000 in-painting images were generated to enhance certain elements. Each of the images were generated in high resolution, and then upscaled further with AI, and edited by hand. Multiple various models are applied to express different themes, and to focus on individual elements (such as faces).
Claire Silver - Genesis
Claire Silver is an anonymous AI artist who was an early adopter in the crypto and NFT space. Her current medium is post-photography, or the manipulation of data to enhance digital images. Her work explores themes of innocence, trauma, the hero's journey, and how our view of them will change in an increasingly transhumanist future. Silver's Genesis project consists of raw AI images organized into narrative categories like “transcendence,” “crossroads,” and “relics of aristocracy.” Referencing historical oil paintings, the collection is characterized by a dark, poetic atmosphere, and uses traits such as “nocturne” and “daybreak” to guide viewers through abstract, evocative imagery.
Boldtron - The Vault of Wonders
Boldtron, are artists specializing in 3D, CGI, VR, and AI. Boldtron focuses on experimenting with and developing new digital techniques, blending organic and manual approaches to continuously evolve their creativity and maintain a fresh perspective in each collaboration. The Vault of Wonders: Chapter 1 - The Abyssal Unseen blends Renaissance curiosity cabinets with deep-sea mysteries using advanced AI video technology. The collection features fantastical creatures that merge natural and digital elements, challenging ideas of life and authenticity. Its looping animations reflect natural cycles and the adaptability of abyssal organisms, while detailed digital designs echo historical scientific illustrations. The work invites viewers to explore the intersection of nature and technology.
Elman Mansimov - alignDRAW
Elman Mansimov is a scientist renowned as the lead developer of the alignDRAW model, which is celebrated as the first text-to-image generation system. Published in the 2015 paper "Generating Images from Captions with Attention," this model flipped an image labeling system to enact the opposite effect by turning text to an image. The alignDRAW series, presented by Fellowship, is a special release of fully on-chain NFTs of this historical artwork, containing all the original 32x32 pixel images created in 2015. Says Darius Himes of Christe's, "These images represent the birth of text prompt AI generated imagery.”
Noper - the afterglow
Noper is a multidisciplinary AI artist who explores both the tangible and intangible aspects of life through technology. Inspired by human emotions and experiences, he creates a unique blend of chaos and hallucinatory visuals, inviting viewers to experience contemporary life through a nostalgic lens of childhood wonder. Featured in the daily.xyz show New Beginnings, this series critiques the idealistic future promised by 90s corporate media, revealing it as a capitalist illusion. It explores our nostalgia for past technologies while we remain ensnared by the fleeting nature of modern consumption, caught between memories and future desires.
Irina Angles and Dr Formalyst - Fragile Memories
Irina Angles is a Ukrainian dancer and multidisciplinary artist. Initially a rhythmic gymnast and later an economist, she began dancing at 22 and developed a career as a choreographer and teacher, influenced by various dance styles. Angles integrates video, AR, VR, and AI into her work, pioneering new intersections between dance and digital art. Nenad Katic, known as Dr. Formalyst, is a visual artist with 25 years of experience in architecture, design, software engineering, and teaching. He explores human perception and creativity using mixed digital techniques like generative CGI, code, and AI, creating dynamic, abstract forms that hint at complex, elusive narratives. Together, they created Fragile Memories, a video art series that uses dance to symbolize the fluid and mutable nature of human memory. It explores how memories are reconstructed and altered each time we recall them, emphasizing the fragility and transformation of our recollections.
PUBLIKFRUIT - De La Naught
The artist known as PUBLIKFRUIT is a motion designer and 3D artist who began their career in film editing and eventually taught themselves 2D and 3D animation. The use of animation software allowed them to reconnect with their filmmaking roots and gain greater creative control. Over the past 15 years, they have worked as a 3D artist and motion designer, blending their passions for film and animation. Alongside their digital work, they have maintained a deep appreciation for analog photography, capturing the raw beauty of moments on 35mm and Medium Format film. De La Naught is a post-photographic animation series that transforms still frames into evolving worlds. Combining subjects, abstractions, and themes of the human condition, it uses unique diffusion models to explore how images impact and evolve perceptions, reflecting a lifetime of thoughts and experiences.
Pindar Van Arman - Reflection
Pindar Van Arman is an artist and roboticist. Since developing his first system in 2005, Van Arman has pioneered the field of robotic art, creating machines named CrowdPainter, bitPaintr, and notably, CloudPainter. These robots, capable of painting with a brush on canvas, showcase a blend of artificial intelligence and machine learning, pushing the boundaries of what is considered creative work. Reflection embodies Van Arman's innovative 'Reflective AI,' which aims to teach machines to paint with childlike spontaneity. The system uses feedback loops and multimodal mark-making, capturing the canvas’s unpredictable paint movements with each mark. This allows the robot to engage with the painting in real-time, blending fluid, gestural strokes with precise ones, ultimately simulating the core elements of the artistic creative process. The digital aspect uses a long-form generative approach that utilizes the physical canvas, capturing stages of the painting, translating them into a digital format, and composing them for minting.
Richard Nadler - Kinoko Dreams
Richard Nadler is a generative artist who explores identity through potent colors and provocative textures. His work spans latent diffusion, GAN, and code-based techniques. He is most known for his Japanese GenArt Collection, which explores his life-long fascination with the culture of Japan, a place he would frequently travel with his late father. Created for Bright Moments Paris, Kinoko Dreams is a collection of Japanese-inspired artworks based on autumn mushroom picking adventures around Tokyo with Nadler's father and his work colleagues. These outings were cherished experiences for Nadler, blending work and family. The collection reflects the stories and myths associated with mushrooms like Matsutake, Shiitake, Maitake, and Enoki, as well as the joy of cooking and bonding over these fungi. The pieces look like whimsical embroidery, adding an additional layer of warmth and nostalgia to the series.
Linda Dounia - Flore Perdue
Artist and designer Linda Dounia is redefining AI by addressing its inherent biases and limitations. Her work, which combines personal and cultural data from her Senegalese heritage with AI algorithms, challenges the current whitewashed state of artificial intelligence. Having transitioned from a digital designer to a full-time artist, Dounia integrates influences from her childhood and notable artists like Julie Mehretu and Alma Thomas. Her artwork, both philosophically and visually striking, represents a form of abstract AI resistance. Created for Bright Moments Paris, Flore Perdue is the second chapter of Once Upon A Garden, a project Dounia started in 2022. It envisions a future where humans interact with simulated plants and flowers due to their real-world extinction. The project explores the compatibility of nature preservation with industrial progress and reflects on what is lost in the pursuit of advancement.
Sofia Crespo - Time after vessels
Sofia Crespo is an artist focused on the intersection of biology and technology, exploring how organic processes influence and mirror artificial systems. She examines similarities between AI image generation and human creativity, questioning AI's impact on artistic practice and the evolving role of artists using machine learning. Created for Bright Moments Tokyo, Time after vessels is a series meant to capture the fleeting nature of underwater experiences, with each photograph representing a unique moment shaped by the elements, creatures, and conditions present. The artist reflects on and processes the visual patterns and textures encountered during dives, using custom algorithms and self-trained GANs to recreate these ephemeral moments as digital fragments.
Emi Kusano - Neural Fad
Emi Kusano is a multimedia artist and leading figure in the Japanese NFT community known for exploring themes of technology, nostalgia, and Japanese pop culture in her work. Beginning as a street photographer in Harajuku, she now specializes in AI photography, installation, music, and video art. Created for Bright Moments Tokyo, Neural Fad explores the intersection of AI and memory by reimagining Tokyo's street fashion history. The project reflects on post-war Japanese fashion subcultures, from the 1940s Moga and Mobo to the Gyaru and Decora styles of the late 90s and early 2000s. Kusano uses AI to create records of these subcultures, presenting a vision of Tokyo street fashion that transcends historical reality and projects into an imagined future.
Nikita Panin - Sticky Return
Nikita Panin is a digital artist focusing on AI and the blockchain with a background in traditional oil painting. His work is characterized by hypnotic, abstract, and mathematically precise elements, with a haunting, often ghoulish aesthetic. Sticky Return is from the series Color Fields. Portraits in Color Fields are constantly morphing, reflecting the fluid and transformative nature of self, devoid of verbal narrative. They appear as dynamic entities, changing and evolving, defined by the colors and shapes they embody and project.
tù.úk'z - Luminous Shadows
Arthur Machado, known as Tù.úk’z, is a self-taught digital artist known for his experimental approach across various digital forms, including glitch, AI, collage, and video. His evolving work often explores abstract and psychedelic themes. Luminous Shadows is an abstract series that feature mesmerizing, organic shapes glowing in neon hues against black backgrounds. The fluid quality of each composition creates a sense of movement and depth, evoking a dreamlike feeling.