An exhibition of works from both local and global artists that were made with, or are about, generative AI. The exhibition ran in the summer and fall of 2023 in Ontario.
Exhibition dates (2023):
May 17–20 • Sundown–11pm: Innis College Courtyard, U of T
May 27–28 • 11am-6pm:
Inter/Access during Doors Open Toronto
May 28–June 11: Libraries around the Greater Toronto Area
June 9:
Transmigrations concert at the Toronto Reference Library
June 12–15 • 12–4pm Gales Gallery at York University
For additional details see the
Exhibition guide PDF.
Participating Artists
- Alejandro Brianza
- Anna Carreras
- Ben Bogart
- Derrick Schultz
- Jane Adams
- Jason Allen
- Jessica Field
- Jordan Shaw
- Keigo Maekawa
- Lauren Aristizabal
- Lauren Lee McCarthy & Kyle McDonald
- Marcel Moonen
- Mark Vargo
- Philippe Pasquier & Jonas Kraasch
- Phivos-Angelos Kollias
- Roberto Santaguida
- Ryan Kelln
- Suzanne Schneider
- Vadim Epstein
Curatorial statement
2022 was the year that the AI image generators reached a level of maturity that the world took notice. 2023 will see the same for music and video. The future of art making has been destabilized, creating opportunities for systemic change and a shift in the status quo. Stability meant submission to the existent powers—despite the reality of digital media being infinitely copy-able, we clung to scarcity and gate-keeping. Artists’ primary choices were how much to submit; how much privacy to cede, how much audience to build, how much content to produce without pay, how much money to be made from advertising, or how to be at the top of the crypto pyramid scheme.
Out of the scientific and technocratic quest to understand the nature of intelligence, we discovered that mimicking the visual cortex was less difficult and far more effective than we could have imagined just a few years ago. Tools that learned from recreating the billions of images on the internet learned their own understanding of those images, and could be guided to create new images using text, opening up image production to everyone that could use language. As the camera did almost 180 years ago, these new intelligent generative tools allow for new ways to be creative, ways that may devalue the skills and expertise required by older tools. AI tools replicate intelligent behaviour, thinking for you, potentially replacing most professional image-making thinking done by humans. What will we think about instead?
Humanity has yet to come to terms with digital networks, much less intelligent digital tools, but despite the often overwhelming feelings of dread and awe at the (often sensationalized) rapid changes, we are fortunate to be here together, when there is a great need for art to help us process these feelings. Being human, with our thinking intertwined with expression and tool making, this practice can now help us think about and build systems that nurture and support art making by humans: art-making in a world shared with new forms of intelligence who have learned, for better or worse, all that they know from us.
Each artist in the exhibition represents their own unique exploration of the use of, and transformation by these tools and their broader impact on arts, culture and labour. Technology has long been a way to make dreams a reality, and as AI grows in capability and accessibility our shared future is one where the dreams of all humanity come true. If some dream of being the all-powerful ruler of the world then the rest of us will live in a nightmare, so we are tasked to tend to dreams, to share a dream of being artists.
Ryan Kelln
May 2023
Alejandro Brianza
Buenos Aires, Argentina
alejandrobrianza.com · andamio.in
Argentinian composer, researcher and teacher. Master in Methodology of Scientific Research and currently PhD candidate in Humanities - Music at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral.
He teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de Lanús, where he is also part of research related to sound technology, electroacoustic music, artistic research and contemporary languages, of which he has given lectures, conferences and workshops at congresses, festivals and various national and international academic meetings.
Anna Carreras
Barcelona, Spain
www.annacarreras.com · twitter.com/carreras_anna
Anna Carreras is a generative artist and creative coder focusing her work on the use of algorithms to create visuals that foster memories or evocate new ones.
She codes her work from scratch to create images that cannot be achieved in any other medium. She is interested in complexity, surprise and meaning that emerges from small simple behaviours playing with systems. She wants to foster diversity and explores the balance between order and chaos in which nature and daily life seem to be suspended.
She draws inspiration from her Mediterranean culture and landscape to translate it into abstract visuals. Vivid digital images, static or dynamic, geometric or organic.
She has exhibited at Feral File, Art Blocks Curated and CVerso galleria. She has also developed and exhibited generative art and digital installations in renowned national and international institutions, museums and festivals like MUTEK ES+AR, Sónar Festival, Eufònic Urbà Decentraland, Venice Art Biennale, Medialab Prado Madrid or Abandon Normal Devices Liverpool, among others.
Ben Bogart
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Ben Bogart is a non-binary adisciplinary artist working for nearly two decades with generative computational processes and has been inspired by knowledge in the natural sciences in the service of an epistemological inquiry. Ben has produced processes, artifacts, texts, images and performances that have been presented at galleries, art festivals and academic conferences internationally. Notable exhibitions include solo shows at the Canadian Embassy at Transmediale in 2017 and the TechLab at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2018. They have been an artist in residence at the Banff Centre (Canada), the New Forms Festival (Canada) and at Videotage (Hong Kong). Their research and practice have been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Derrick Schultz
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Derrick Schultz is a designer and post-AI artist. His artwork connects current technological trends with past scientific theory, experimental film history, and technology’s relationship to climate change. His work has been seen in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and for clients such as Sony and HP. Derrick has taught numerous courses on media art and generative machine learning technology, independently and for major universities. He is currently an adjunct professor at NYU’s ITP covering AI art and algorithmic filmmaking.
Jane Adams
Boston, MA, USA
universalities.com · instagram.com/artistjaneadams
Jane Adams is an emergent media artist based in Boston, Massachusetts (USA). Jane's work blends new technologies with natural flora and phenomena to create immersive and tactile art experiences. Ms. Adams holds an MFA in emergent media, and is currently pursuing a PhD in computer science at Northeastern University, where her research focus is visualization for systems genetics.
Jason Allen
Pueblo West, CO, USA
Jason M. Allen is the President and CEO of Art Incarnate, a company dedicated to creating luxury A.I. products and A.I. Completions (AICs), which is Jason's term for "A.I. artwork." His AIC, Théâtre d'Opéra Spatial, won first place in a Fine Art competition and sparked a worldwide controversy in the art community. Jason holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Colorado Technical University.
More recently, Jason started leading a nationwide movement called COVER (Copyright Obstruction Violates Expressive Rights) to spur change in US copyright after the U.S. Copyright Office rejected his copyright claim on AI-generated artwork. Jason's goal is to raise awareness about the impact of A.I. on various fields and promote a responsible and beneficial relationship with technology. He believes in A.I. Humanism, which focuses on living harmoniously with technology without merging with it (an alternative to Transhumanism).
Jessica Field
Oshawa, ON, Canada
Jessica Field lives and works in Canada. She is interested in the impact of our environment on mental health, and how our individual histories and temperaments influence the ways that we live out our lives. Jessica works with drawing, installation, video, and performance to create artificial intelligent systems that study the dynamic theory of personality, bringing together both psychology research and computer science.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, in institutions such as the Malmo Konstall Gallery, Sweden; Museum Tingley, Switzerland; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Canada. Field’s work has received two honourable mentions at the Vida Life Art and Artificial Life International Award Competition for her Artificial Life projects SICB (Semiotic Investigation into Cybernetic Behaviour), 2004 and Maladjusted Ecosystem, 2008.
Jessica Field teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. She received her AOCAD at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, Ontario, and her MFA at Concordia University in Montreal.
Jordan Shaw
Toronto, ON, Canada
jordanshaw.com · instagram.com/jshaw3
Jordan Shaw is an artist and creative technologist raised in Scarborough and is currently based in Toronto, Canada. He received his MFA from OCAD University's Digital Futures program leading to his thesis being exhibited during Vector Festival at InterAccess. Before that, he completed his undergraduate degrees at Carleton University and Algonquin College, where his final installation was exhibited at ACM SIGGRAPH.
His work is related to exploring the hidden and unseen aspects of technology, the digital environment around us and how we exist within this hybrid world. The manifestation of this work tries to visualize the hidden interactions between people and technology, data collection and the digital systems that are trying to understand the physical world. Part of this exploration has led to collaborating with AI and Machine Learning algorithms. In doing so, Jordan has both used pre-trained AI models and data sets as well as created his own data sets to teach those algorithms. An ongoing series of this AI-generated work related to Canadian landscapes, Canadian Impressionists painting styles like the Group of Seven and others, blending Canadian history, nature and the outdoors along with technology and innovation.
Keigo Maekawa
Toronto, ON, Canada
kmaekawaphoto.wixsite.com/images · instagram.com/nik.ivl
Keigo is a photographer from Sendai, Japan and is based in Mississauga, Ontario. He graduated from Toronto's OCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography.
He has shown work in Canada at Gallery 44 as well as overseas at Berlin's University of Europe for Applied Sciences. His work will be on display at OCAD University's GradEx 108 in May as well as a part of the Provocation Ideas Festival in June.
Keigo's work is all digital and he photographs scenes in both natural and urban settings. Landscapes capture a lot of what he looks for in photographs: a sense of space where everything comes together nicely like a puzzle. Still, the studio is where he lets his creativity run free and can allow himself to experiment with all sorts of ideas.
Lauren Aristizabal
Bradenton, FL, USA
Lauren Aristizabal is a mixed-media artist based in Southwest Florida. Their work explores themes of identity, self, and our relationship with the natural world.
Lauren Lee McCarthy &
Kyle McDonald
USA
lauren-mccarthy.com · kylemcdonald.net
Lauren Lee McCarthy (she/they) is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She has received grants and residencies from Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance New Frontier, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Autodesk, and Ars Electronica. Lauren's work has been exhibited internationally, at places such as the Barbican Centre, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Haus der elektronischen Künste, SIGGRAPH, Onassis Cultural Center, IDFA DocLab, Science Gallery Dublin, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Japan Media Arts Festival.
Lauren is also the creator of p5.js, an open-source art and education platform that prioritizes access and diversity in learning to code, with over 10 million users. She expanded on this work in her role from 2015–21 on the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation, whose mission is to serve those who have historically not had access to the fields of technology, code, and art in learning software and visual literacy. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT.
Kyle McDonald is an artist working with code. He crafts interactive installations, sneaky interventions, playful websites, workshops, and toolkits for other artists working with code. Exploring possibilities of new technologies: to understand how they affect society, to misuse them, and build alternative futures; aiming to share a laugh, spark curiosity, create confusion, and share spaces with magical vibes. Working with machine learning, computer vision, social and surveillance tech spanning commercial and arts spaces. Previously adjunct professor at NYU's ITP, member of F.A.T. Lab, community manager for openFrameworks, and artist in residence at STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU, and YCAM in Japan. Work commissioned and shown around the world, including: the V&A, NTT ICC, Ars Electronica, Sonar, Todays Art, and Eyebeam.
Marcel Moonen
Switzerland (Nationality: Dutch)
"Super Abstraction is simple, playful, and bold. My work is partly generated ~ partly composed."
After more than 10 years of artistic activity, a key moment occurs for Marcel Moonen in 2018. Soon after he founded "Super Abstraction". Within the framework of this novel style of exaggerated abstraction, an extensive body of work is created. In the visual works, in principle, motifs are reduced to their smallest pictorial units through an artistic process, and then re-presented in different variations and compositions. In this playful process, the artist also likes to put the original motif into a new context or vice versa.
In addition to the artist’s visual oeuvre, he produces essays and books. The artist also adapts the principle of "Super Abstraction" in his writing. Almost cryptographic texts, which despite their complexity ultimately convey very simple messages to the individual reader. Furthermore, Moonen’s literary work provides fundamental theories on his work as well as on holistic aspects of art.
Mark Vargo
Colusa, CA, USA
With a Bachelor's of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois and more than ten years working as a multidisciplinary creative, Mark Vargo has developed a unique vision and craft for his artwork that involves traditional paper collage techniques combined with non-traditional materials, pushing the boundaries of collage into multidimensional, experiential, and digital spaces. His work often uses AI as a tool to communicate concepts of location, emotion, and contemporary world issues. Mark's art has been shown in galleries and museums around the USA and has won awards including Honorable Mention at Art Melt Louisiana, Capitol Park Museum. The current body of work being shown with Provocation Ideas Festival includes AI-generated "self-portrait" images created by a custom-trained generative model based on 100+ images of Mark's artwork.
Vargo hopes more artists take the opportunity to train AI on their existing work. AI image generation has not replaced his practice, only informed it and given him an extra tool in his artistic toolkit. He hopes to encourage more artists in the future to use AI in ethical and empowering ways to push their work forward.
Philippe Pasquier & Jonas Kraasch
Vancouver, BC, Canada
metacreation.net · instagram.com/metacreationlab · linkedin.com/company/metacreation-lab
Philippe Pasquier is a professor at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology of Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on the theory and practice of Artificial Intelligence, i.e., endowing machines with autonomous behaviours, with a focus on creative and artistic applications. In his artistic practice, focused primarily on sonic arts, he is interested in studying and exploiting the various relationships and synergies between art, science and technology. He has been acting as a performer, director, composer, musician, producer and educator in many different contexts.
Jonas Kraasch is a graduate student at Simon Fraser University’s School for Interactive Arts and Technology, where he is part of the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. With his prior studies in Cognitive Science with a focus on Deep Learning, his goal is to combine both his passions for AI and creative expression by creating both creative systems and tools to assist artists in their work. In his research he focuses on deep learning, machine learning, creative AI, data ethics, and generative models
Phivos-Angelos Kollias
Born: Rhodes, Greece; Residence: Berlin, Germany
instagram.com/kollias_music · phivos-angelos-kollias.com
Dr. Phivos-Angelos Kollias explores emerging technologies' creative potential and their impact on our society. By combining his classical music background and knowledge of innovative techniques and concepts, he creates digital projects that explore how technology can be used for artistic expression. His projects often take the form of interactive performances or virtual reality, aiming to push the boundaries of creative expression and give voice to the challenges and opportunities that technology brings. Through his work, Kollias explores themes such as Artificial Intelligence, bridging the listening with the other senses and multi-disciplinary collaborations. His music encourages critical thinking about the social and cultural implications of technology while exploring how technology has the potential to enhance human creativity.
Kollias has a PhD in electroacoustic music from the University of Paris VIII, applying cognitive studies to music composition and performance. He studied composition with Horacio Vaggione, Jean-Luc Hervé, Yan Maresz, José Manuel López López and Richard Hoadley. He has received seven awards and nine nominations in international competitions, and he group projects he has participated in have won twelve awards and distinctions.
Roberto Santaguida
Hamburg, Germany
Since completing his studies in film production at Concordia University, Roberto Santaguida’s films and videos have been shown at more than 400 international festivals, including Tampere Film Festival (Finland), CPH: DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Denmark), Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil (Brazil), Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival (United States), transmediale (Germany), and Message to Man (Russia). He has also taken part in artist residencies in numerous countries, including Iran, Romania, Germany, Norway, and Australia. Roberto is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.
Ryan Kelln
Toronto, ON, Canada
Ryan Kelln is a software artist currently living in Toronto, Canada. He has a background in art, tech and video game development, but tries to spend as much of his time as possible designing and creating systems to enlighten and empower. He is a strong advocate for open source software and the creative commons. Since 2015 he has been focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence and its implications and interactions with art and economics.
Aong with composer and musician Dhaivat Jani, he is performing Transmissions, a live music concert with AI generated visuals, on June 9th.
Suzanne Schneider
Bloomington, Indiana, USA
suzanne-schneider.com · instagram.com/swedes_experience · youtube.com/@swedesexperience6228
Suzanne Schneider, otherwise known online as Swedes Experience, is a graduating BFA of Digital Art student at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana USA. With career goals of becoming an art therapist, Suzanne wanted to explore how the use of Artificial Intelligence could help her in creating a meditative experience for people to enjoy communally.
Vadim Epstein
eps.here.ru · twitter.com/eps696 · instagram.com/eps696 · github.com/eps696
Media artist, director, educator, coder, VJ; former IT consultant and casual theoretical physicist, combining serious technical background, strong corporate experience and vivid creative mind. Has worked in various fields such as net.art and science art since 1996, eventually focused on visual media with stochastic algo narratives.
As an artist and curator, had made visuals for hundreds of concerts, festivals, parties, and commercial events. The artworks have been exhibited worldwide in Montreal, Vancouver, Stuttgart, Paris, London, Lille, at New Tretyakov gallery, video anthologies; highlighted on the conferences NeurIPS 2020 / 2021 / 2022, CVPR 2021; sold as NFT collections TEOPEMA, Pixie, etc. Personal style tends towards bold recognizable aesthetics, combining generative and figurative, with high impact native to post-industrial cultures.
The founder and creative director of in[visible] studio [since 2009]. Besides commercial and personal projects, has delivered numerous talks, workshops, and training courses. Current focus is on AI/ML [since 2017], generative graphics, new media art, and creative coding in general.
