Computational creativity: 14 AI Artists whose work to explore
A list of our favourite artists who are using AI as a tool for their creative work
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AI is being used in many professions — but what about the creative industry? How do artists use AI in their work? Currently, it’s not a very common tool for artists, but the good news is that this number is increasing. You can see bits of AI in many parts of the creative fields: from visual arts to dance, music, and even photography. In this article we’ll introduce some of our favourite artists who are using AI in their practice.
1. SOUGWEN CHUNG is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the communication between humans and machines. She is using a robot hand to create her artworks. This robot mimics her brush/marker strokes while she is painting with her hand. Sougwen’s art practice includes different art fields, including installation, sculpture, still image, drawing, and performance.
2. WAYNE MCGREGOR is a choreographer and director. In the “Living Archive” project, Wayne and Google Arts & Culture collaborated to experiment with AI and dance dialogue. The AI tool generates real-time new original movements for/with professional dancers. They trained the AI model with thousands of hours of Wayne’s archive videos, collected for 25 years.
3. PINDAR VAN ARMAN is, as he introduced himself, an AI artist collaborating with his painting robots’ creative mind. He teaches his robot assistants how to paint by deconstructing his artistic process, critiquing the results, modifying the algorithms in a loop. His last project, called “Artonomous” is a collaboration with Kitty Simpson, photographer, which draws portraits inspired by a set of reference photographs using AI, feedback loops, and deep learning.
4. REFIK ANADOL is a new media artist, creating parametric data sculpture and live visual/audio performance in his installations. He is exploring the space between the digital and physical world using machine intelligence by demonstrating a hybrid relationship between space design and media arts.
5. ANNA RIDLER is an artist and researcher that is using her own handmade datasets for creating artworks. Constructing personal datasets is helping her to find underlying concepts and themes while using them. Her datasets include selected captured and classified images and texts, which needs a laborious process to create. In “Mosaic Virus”, she uses her dataset and AI to display evolving videos of tulips based on bitcoin's price.
6. DANIEL AMBROSI is one of the creators of the AI art movement. In his project “Dreamscapes”, he created a series of landscape images using a unique form of computational photography, which he built back in 2011. Along with this dataset, he used an enhanced version of “DeepDream,” a computer vision program designed by Google in Dreamscapes.
7. HELENA SARIN is a software engineer and visual artist using GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) to create artworks. “Neural Bricolage,” founded by Helena, is featuring her AI-assisted pieces. They are created using a dataset consists of her own drawings, sketches, and photographs as datasets.
8.LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY is an artist that embodies machines to examine social relationships in today’s world. She works with performance, software, electronics, internet, film, photography, and installation, “trying to understand the distance between the algorithm and herself, between others and herself”.
9. SCOTT EATON is an artist and creative technologists, creating his artworks by combining traditional craft with contemporary digital tools. He uses deep neural networks in his work called “Hyperbolic Composition I: Genesis”, which is an expressive, novel figurative image of the human body.
10. SOFIA CRESPO is a generative artist focused on artificial lifeforms. She is interested in biology-inspired technologies. Her artworks are answers to the question of how new tech can help us connect with nature and love it more.
11. KYLE MCDONALD. “Artist working with code” is the way Kyle introduces himself. Besides using code and machine learning to create his own artworks, he contributes to developing new tools and open-source toolkits for artists to use them in creative ways.
12. TARYN SOUTHERN is an artist, storyteller, and a producer with futuristic mindset working in the intersection of storytelling and technology. “I AM AI” is created by Taryn in 2018, which is the first album composed and produced by AI.
13. TOM WHITE is collaborating with AI systems to create abstract prints to see the machine perception through their eye. His artworks are creations by AI for AI to investigate around the question, how machines see, understand, and articulate the world.
14. BEN SNELL. Thinking of computational power as new raw material, Ben creates artwork (photographs, sculptures, and drawings) using contemporary materials and techniques in combination with traditional motifs. A computer program sculpted “Dio”, trained by a dataset of classical sculpture archives.
Meet the author
Boshra Javaheri is a designer and researcher with a diverse background in architecture, product design, and human-centered experience design. She is curious about people and has a passion for their experiences, emotions, and interactions with AI. You can find more about her here.
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