Art Basel Miami, 2024
Untitled Art Fair
11/11/2024
Kate Vass Galerie presents a curated program focused on artworks created with AI or other cutting-edge technologies by internationally renowned artists, including: Alexander Mordvintsev, David Young, Ganbrood, Ivona Tau, Kevin Abosch, Mario Klingemann, Memo Akten, Roope Rainisto, Sarah Friend, Sasha Stiles, ThankYouX, Nancy Burson, and Osinachi at the upcoming Untitled Art, a leading contemporary art fair taking place on the sands of Miami Beach from 3-8th December.
Mistaken Identity, 2018 by Mario Klingemann
This program emphasizes the historical development and innovative potential of AI in art, showcasing early works created with technologies such as GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) from around 2017-2018 and the foundational DeepDream from 2015. These pieces serve as early landmarks in AI art, demonstrating the medium’s capacity to create visually compelling and thought-provoking images.
One of the early examples is "Neural Glitch" technique by Mario Klingemann. He began exploring it in April 2018,"Neural Glitch" involves manipulating fully trained GANs by randomly altering, deleting, or swapping their trained weights. These glitches impact both texture and semantics, causing the models to misinterpret input data in unexpected ways—sometimes suggesting a form of autonomous creativity. In this process, the same input data can yield varied results depending on the glitch, while different inputs processed by the same glitched model chain reveal a coherent style with consistent misinterpretations. Mario’s custom architectures, derived from concepts in pix2pix and pix2pixHD, reduce typical GAN artifacts and offer finer control over details. The outputs are generated entirely from scratch, except for face markers sourced from existing material. Mario often chains multiple GANs with different roles: some generate faces from markers, others create markers from images, and others add textures from incomplete data. Depending on where glitches occur, later models attempt to "heal" these accidents, resulting in surreal compositions—what Mario calls "Neurealism."
"Neural Glitch" serves as a foundation for various series, including Mistaken Identity, a video triptych nearly 2-hour long exhibited at Beyond Festival, ZKM Karlsruhe, in October 2018, available in three chapters.
Alexander Mordvintsev, Flourishing, 2018
Flourishing (2018) was created using DeepDream, a technique developed by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev. This artwork, showcased at Art Fair Zurich 2018, features a vibrant composition of colorful houses intertwined with surreal floral patterns, evoking a sense of flourishing nature.
DeepDream is a computer vision program developed by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev, utilizing a convolutional neural network (CNN) to enhance patterns in images through algorithmic pareidolia, producing surreal, psychedelic visuals. The program popularized the term "deep dreaming," referring to the generation of images that activate specific features in a trained deep network. Originating from Google's "Inception" neural network for the 2014 ImageNet Challenge, DeepDream's open-source code was released in July 2015. The process involves feeding an image into the neural network and iteratively adjusting it based on the network’s recognition of various features, amplifying edges, and shapes to create hallucinatory effects where familiar objects morph into complex, often bizarre patterns. DeepDream showcases the power of neural networks in image processing and offers insight into the workings of machine learning models, merging technology and art.
Ivona Tau, Whiff of Pain, 2024
Osinachi, Adam and Steve, 2024
Ivona Tau will display two works that explore the delicate nature of pain, juxtaposing it with the lightness of silk. These pieces create a reimagined dialogue with suffering, questioning the boundaries between physicality and emotion through a medium that is both gentle and hauntingly expressive.
Osinachi, Africa’s foremost cryptoartist will present the work Adam & Steve. Conservative Christianity’s distortion of the Adam and Eve narrative has fueled a homophobic agenda, particularly evident in their support of anti-gay legislation across the globe. The reclamation of the phrase "Adam and Steve" by the LGBTQ+ community is a powerful act of resistance against this oppressive force. Osinachi’s "Adam & Steve" is a bold digital artwork that intersects this sociopolitical struggle with the urgent crisis of biodiversity loss. Through a visually striking and technologically innovative medium, the piece challenges traditional narratives and invites viewers to consider the interconnectedness of human rights and environmental protection. By juxtaposing iconic representations of human love with the stark realities of endangered African species—the black rhinoceros, African forest elephant, Roloway monkey, Albany adder, aspalathus recurvispina, anthocleista vogelii, tetradiclis tenella, acampe pachyglossa, and Xylopia amplexicaulis—the artist creates a visual tapestry that both provokes and inspires. The digital format allows for a complex interplay of imagery and symbolism, making "Adam & Steve" a contemporary and relevant commentary on our times.
Kevin Abosch, Front-Runner, 2024
Kevin Abosch showcases a body of work titled MEV (Maximal Extractable Value), where obfuscated cryptographic hashes manifest as layers of alphanumeric hexadecimals, painted in acrylic on paper. Abosch’s approach confronts the unseen mechanisms behind digital transactions and the invisible hand of algorithmic intervention in markets. MEV bots, short for Maximal Extractable Value bots, are automated agents designed to exploit blockchain transactions by manipulating transaction order and front-running trades, allowing the extraction of maximum profit at the expense of other participants. By abstracting these cryptographic marks into a tangible medium, Abosch bridges the digital and physical realms, exposing the raw aesthetic of algorithmic predation and the complex power structures embedded within the blockchain ecosystem. The work invites contemplation on the opaque forces driving contemporary finance, highlighting both the beauty and brutality of a system that operates outside human visibility yet profoundly impacts reality.
Deep Meditations: A brief history of almost everything (2018) by Memo Akten
Memo Akten is presenting Deep Meditations, 2018 a body of work enhanced with an original audio composition to accompany its immersive experience. Deep Meditations exists in multiple forms, primarily as a large-scale video and sound installation, as well as a multi-channel, long-form abstract film. The work serves as a monument that celebrates life, nature, the universe, and our subjective experience of it.
With its slow, meditative flow of continuously evolving images and sounds, the piece invites viewers on a spiritual journey through the imagination of a deep artificial neural network. It encourages us to reflect on our role as humans within a complex ecosystem, one that is intricately dependent on the balanced co-existence of countless components.
Deep Meditations embraces and celebrates the interconnectedness of all things—human, non-human, living, and non-living—across vast scales of time and space, from the smallest microbes to the farthest galaxies.
Ganbrood, What is madness, if not the soul’s protest against an indifferent world?, 2024
AI artist Ganbrood (Bas Uterwijk, 1968) presents an exclusive work titled Looking for Vincent, where he attempts to reconstruct the "true" face of Vincent van Gogh using cutting-edge artificial intelligence. The piece is based on 35 self-portraits by Van Gogh, a rare photograph of the painter at 19 years old, and painted portraits by Van Gogh’s close colleagues. Despite the many well-known images, the true appearance of Van Gogh remains a mystery. His self-portraits were more an expression of his inner world than an accurate reflection of his physical features, leaving much to speculation about what he truly looked like.
Through Looking for Vincent, Ganbrood leverages AI to offer a speculative yet deeply human interpretation, exploring the intersection of technology and history while questioning the boundaries between identity, perception, and artistic representation. The work challenges our assumptions about the "real" Vincent van Gogh, inviting us to reconsider the nature of self-image and the ways in which history and memory are reconstructed through both human and machine-driven processes.
The program is extensive, and we are featuring only a selection of artists and works. The full list of artists includes internationally renowned names such as Alexander Mordvintsev, David Young, Ganbrood, Ivona Tau, Kevin Abosch, Mario Klingemann, Memo Akten, Roope Rainisto, Sarah Friend, Sasha Stiles, ThankYouX, Nancy Burson, and Osinachi. For the complete lineup, please refer to the catalogue.
