KVG Virtual Artist Studio visit: meet & greet David Young!
We continue our virtual travel worldwide and are happy to release today the third KVG Virtual Artist Studio Tour! This time, David Young is inviting us to his farm in Bovina, NY, so everyone can discover the beauty behind his work.
David Young is an artist who has spent his entire career at the leading edge of emerging technologies. From projects using early supercomputers and the dawn of the web to contemporary global innovation and artistic initiatives, David has been a champion for new forms of creativity and expression enabled by technology.
His current work focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, asking if it is ‘inevitable that only our largest organizations, with their vast data sets, will decide how we will use AI? Will AI simply reinforce and accelerate the inequalities and biases that already polarize society and threaten our planet? What if, instead, we could start small? To work at the scale of the personal. To engage directly with AI. Could doing so allow us to develop new intuitions and understandings of what the technology is, and what it could enable?’
To David, beauty and aesthetic experiences are a powerful way to engage critically with technology.
By using intentionally small data sets, often photos taken from the rural context of his farm in upstate New York, David trains the machine to build a limited understanding of the natural world.
The work explores how aesthetic experiences can give a fresh start to how we think about artificial intelligence. And its scale highlights the irrationality of AI and its unique and unknowable materiality.
‘Learning Nature’ by David Young
Each book is signed and numbered as part of an edition of 100
Available at KVG online store
The Artist, writing about his Flowers and Winter Woods works -which are part of the ‘Learning Nature’ project - states: ‘Nothing that emerges is accurate, but the work isn’t asking for accuracy - it’s asking for the machine to build its own unique vision of the natural world.
What I’ve discovered, through the process of helping the machine learn nature, is that it is indeed a symbiotic process. The “artist” must tune the imagery that’s put into the “machine” to craft its interpretation of nature. And the artist must continue to select the work that the machine creates (much like photographers would use a contact sheet) in order to make the most unique, and frankly beautiful, interpretation of nature.’
“Training the machine with limited data reveals the irrationality, and the beauty, of AI.”
David Young is also interested in exploring the strangeness of how the machine learns and creates.
‘Given that we can’t help but use human terms to describe the behaviour of AI systems, might machine “emotions” be a new way for us to approach and understand AI? Could romanticism – emphasizing the free expression of the machine’s emotions as the most authentic source of aesthetic experience – be the foundation for a new AI aesthetic?
These images are an exploration of the materiality of AI. Treating the machine as a Tabula Rasa, or blank slate, I trained it with no more than a handful of images – solid colors or basic shapes. The resulting works ask us to consider the emotions that might be present in the machine as it creates.’
For more information we highly recommend reading his essay ‘Tabula Rasa’.
David’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions - including the Automat und Mensch show at Kate Vass Galerie - and magazines like ESPACE art actuel, IMPULSE - DAS MAGAZIN DER VOLKSWAGENSTIFTUNG and IEEE Computer Graphics magazine.
David Young
A Line is a Pixel Expressing Itself (m,b70h,9011,4-20,4,22,11,4,27-c), 2020
From the ‘Manipulations’ series
The works is available as unique NFT on the blockchain and as a print.
Kate Vass Galerie is glad to announce that selected works by David Young will be exhibited at CADAF Online next week, including one his latest pieces from the new series ‘Manipulations’ - Manipulated AI / Machine Learning generated images.
“We believe that the machine is creating images similar to what it was shown. But this prioritization on the visual reflects our own human biases and prejudices. The machine “sees” differently from us, and, so too, what it creates may not be entirely visible to our eyes. By manipulating the machine-created images I seek to reveal that which is not visible to us, but may be apparent, perhaps even obvious, to the machine. What are the hidden patterns, or the “irrational logic,” embedded within images created by the machine?”
David Young works are available as unique NFTs on the blockchain and as beautiful prints.