Rather than act as a mirror, dutifully recreating or reporting back on the world around us, these artists often act as a portal to an entirely new universe. A universe where the artist has crafted unique entities from scratch through many compressed cycles of evolution. Where fascinating beings and impossible environments blend the foreign and the familiar, giving us a sense that there is life here, but perhaps not life as weve known it. This show focuses on the artistic process, highlighting how the proliferation of work afforded by digital tools often leads the artist to spend as much time curating as creating. However, it can be hard for the viewer to gather much context when looking at just one or two works by an artist. So as part of my prompt, I also asked the artists to leverage Edward Tuftes concept of small multiples, which display a set of images in close proximity together in order to facilitate comparisons across the full group of images at a glance.  Artnome - Jason Bailey

Feral File  Field Guide

hedgerow still life presents us with an uncanny valley of botanicals. The forms are beautiful, floral, and delicate in nature. They leverage a visual language we think we all speak, but the specifics of the vocabulary are of Crespos own device. The closer you look, the less familiar they become, dissolving into something new. Its like when you have a vivid dream and you are back in your childhood home only to have someone elses parents walk around the corner. The artist uses neural networks trained on large data sets of images from nature to extract textures, reimagining and remixing our reality into fantastic new worlds.

hedgerow still life #97

The Bardo: Unpacking the Real is an exhibition that quantifies the ephemeral as it relates to the liminal landscape of sculptural art in the digital age. The exhibition examines the real and (un)real in digital sculpture; questions what it means to view and collect digital sculptures; and investigates the role of NFTs in the creation of the featured artists' work. Named after an afterlife concept in the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Bardo explores the possibilities of what sculpture can be, and how it can be viewed. The exhibition takes the idea of a sculpture to the next level by reinventing how sculpture can be seen and collected, and featuring different innovations around the notion of ownership. The Bardo: Unpacking the Real exemplifies the creativity, enthusiasm, and energy (both human and electromagnetic) that reflects this historic time in art history. Julie Walsh

Feral File  The Bardo: Unpacking the Real

Carla Gannis&rsquo;s &ldquo;peep-o-rama&rdquo; playfully examines what it has meant to gaze at a sculpture throughout the canon of art history. Inspired by one of Gannis&rsquo; vivid dreams, the piece was further informed by the Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) peep box show at the National Gallery in London. To create the colors and forms in the peep box backgrounds, she trained an AI using images from Times Square pornographic peepshows (for the colors) and images from Dutch painting (for the forms). Once a collector purchases Gannis&rsquo; work, the mystery of the peep box&rsquo;s contents is revealed through a variety of unique experiences, including a view modeled after one of Hoogstraten&rsquo;s works, a single-person VR view (which allows you to visit the inside the peep box itself), and a social VR version where you can hang out with your friends in a space-age bachelorette pad. The peep box sculpture addresses such serious topics as gender and body politics in art history, the idea of public and private ownership of data, and how technology challenges the very notion of seeing.

peep-o-rama #68

Were used to following instructions. The pandemic has only increased our need to be told what to do: Everywhere, lines of security tape delimited the spaces we could go, or where we could sit. While we navigate a changing environment, looking for directions and adapting to circumstances, we try to improve, to learn something new, to keep calm, to do more exercise. Meanwhile, the platforms and apps we use apply the algorithms designed by their developers to cater to our needs, customize our experiences, and gently influence our behavior. Instructions follow: As we move into the future, there will continue to be more indications, regulations, and control placed over us. The artworks in this exhibition explore our relationships with digital devices and information systems from the perspectives of both humans and machines, as a way to reflect on how our present time is governed by codes, regulations, and defaults. Pau Waelder

Feral File  Instructions Follow

The hierarchical nature of social media has enabled influencers to become modern-day pagan deities, extending their power over the masses of believers who worship them. In &ldquo;Neonumens,&rdquo; Solim&aacute;n L&oacute;pez addresses this idea by exploring the Instagram feed of Brazilian beauty blogger Camila Coelho, who regularly shares makeup tutorials, archetypes of ideal beauty, and her luxurious lifestyle to her 9.2 million followers. The artist focuses on two images posted on the social media platform in particular&mdash;one featuring Coelho and two friends, and another depicting a baby shower with a dog sleeping on a couch next to a newborn and a large teddy bear. These images are recreated using 3D libraries and image recognition software, and then incorporated into a virtual installation. A video created by the artist explores the simulated piece, and is accompanied by sound generated from light values extracted from one of the images.

The wireframe structures of the 3D objects and the feature detection marks become neon lights and wire mesh sculptures in a composition that is reminiscent of both an altarpiece and a futuristic shop window display. Overall, the method for obtaining these elements and the resulting imagery remind us of the algorithmic nature of the contents we consume in social media. Coelho&rsquo;s success and the particular type of images she disseminates result from unspoken rules, social codes, and the snowball effect of being favored by the sorting algorithms of the media platform.

Neonumens #36

Antoine Schmitt has rewritten a computer game he initially created in the 1970s, using the programming language Logo. &ldquo;Minos&rdquo; is an interactive game based on the well-known Greek myth in which the player, in the role of Theseus, has to escape an invisible maze before getting caught by a Minotaur. Both characters are represented by circles inside a minimalistic maze that is only made visible as they continue to explore the labyrinth. The artwork offers an engaging gameplay and can also be contemplated as a generative visual composition reminiscent of kinetic and op art, in line with the aesthetics of the artist&rsquo;s other process-based works.

Conceptually, the game explores the unspoken rules and codes that we encounter in our daily lives, whether on the level of administrative regulations, social behavior, or software. From this perspective, the game&rsquo;s objective (constant escape from an endless labyrinth inhabited by a threatening character) can have multiple meanings. As one example, in Minos, the walls of the labyrinth aren&rsquo;t the only hidden component, as the rules of the game are also obscured at first. The player has to discover the rules by playing, and in that sense, it is a game with instructions that follow.

Minos #36

This exhibition borrows its name from Willliam Gibsons first published short story, Fragments of a Hologram Rose. As the story notes, when a hologram is cut into pieces, even the smallest section still contains the whole of the image. In a similar way, plant cuttings and an edition of digital works can both hold these mirroring elements of origin and multiplicity. The artists featured in the exhibition were asked to imagine and create their own sci-fi plants. Like botanists from a parallel future, these artists cultivated their fictions into existence. They sub-scattered seed pods, pruned polygon cuttings, gave their models plenty of volumetric lighting, and soaked them in fluid simulations. The 3D objects in this exhibition have secret pathways and telepathic tendrils. They bloom on neon skins and disperse nano mold spores through LCD screens. Like an ikebana of poisonous flowers in zero gravity, they hover in the expanse as a collection of fragmented flora files. Rick Silva

Feral File  Fragments of a Hologram Rose

High quality 3D model of a rose, real-world scale, centered at the origin. This prop is suitable for close-up and medium-distance renders.
Polys: 717,452
Verts: 364,334

Rose #48

For Your Eyes Only aims to stimulate a conversation with contemporary artists about the future of human visual culture, and to investigate how they are working, in different ways, on the development of a visual language capable to resist machine vision and its implications, and to improve human visual communicationa post-AI, posthuman human vision. The exhibition includes images of diverse nature and origin, submitted as answers to questions of how humans will continue to see and understand images differently than machines do. The images in this exhibition can be used like answers, but they are rather proofs. They have been sent by a human to another human, each of them carrying much more than what I asked for. They are not delivering an answer, they are the answer. Try to read them, and youll soon find out that they have as many readings as readers. Enjoy, theyre for your eyes only. Domenico Quaranta

Feral File  For Your Eyes Only

According to the art critic Arthur C. Danto, To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decryan atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld. Since 2014, Jonas Lund has been making abstract paintings using elements sampled from paintings by other emerging artists, optimized for market success. The morphing animations in Smart Cut are made out of images from this series that were not selected for production: works as part of the process, works as they were before they got good, left-over abstractions. Turned into animations, these discarded imagesnot art, according to Lund"s artistic theoryhave been selected by a smart cut algorithm as the best ones and automatically pieced together.

Smart Cut #51

To create a complete 360 representation of a real human figure, visual effects companies utilize 3D imaging technology. One can then unwrap the scanned texture into a 2D plane, much like a world map. In I I, Jon Rafman alters a selection of these unwrapped head textures and animates the transformation in the style of VFX breakdown reels, typically used to showcase the special effects in movies and games. The result is a jarring conglomeration of characters, a carnivalesque cast of commodities. Rafman"s work is the reverse of anthropomorphism: I represent the reified experience of the self and others as mere objects and images. Rafman states that these custom textures will evolve into wearable skins designed for 3D avatars, which, in turn, may eventually be purchased and used to inhabit the various metaverses. In a world where most of one"s time is spent in online worlds, avatars become increasingly crucial to constructing our identities. The dividing line between our real and virtual bodies has already blurred. As we spend more of our existence in front of a screen, our web personas become more significant to who we are than our physical bodies. When one wears a mask long enough, it is absorbed into ones character.

I I #100

One Million Manga Pages shows 1,074,790 unique pages from 883 different manga series from Japan, Korea, and China. The series includes both popular long-running titles such as Naruto and One Piece, as well as several short-lived titles. Custom software that implements computer vision methods was used to measure selected visual characteristics of every page. Another custom program mapped the positioned images of pages on a 30,000 x 30,000 pixels canvas according to two such features (X-axis: standard deviation. Y-axis: entropy.) The visualization shows which graphical choices are more commonly used by manga artists (the central part of the cloud of pages) and which appear much more rarely (bottom and left parts).

One Million Manga Pages #94

Inspired by several texts on the interactions between humans and machines&mdash;such as Sherry Turkle&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Second Self&rdquo; or Luciano Floridi&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Onlife Manifesto&rdquo;&mdash;Irma Marco&rsquo;s work asks a na&iuml;ve but complex question: &ldquo;Are Smart Machines Alive?&rdquo; She initiates a dialogue between the virtual assistants Cortana (Microsoft) and Siri (Apple) by inserting questions raised by these texts, and by playing with the misunderstandings and failed translations that occur as the programs aim to process and reply to the data they receive.

Marco stages this exchange using a deliberately cheap and low-fi aesthetic that is reminiscent of late night TV fortune tellers, and which playfully contradicts the sleek design of the devices and the promised flawless performance of the software. As the piece runs, the dialogue progressively turns into a cacophony as the synthetic voices deliver increasingly incoherent sentences, incorrectly interpreted by a speech-to-text software. Text fills the screen and then turns into an indecipherable string of letters and symbols, which is actually IZZZJ, a coded language invented by the artist. Marco carries out this experiment in order to underscore the flaws and limitations of a technology that has made us question what it is to be human.

Are Smart Machines Alive? #36

Anna Carreras generative art often challenges the conventional aesthetics of the medium by generating visual outputs that are both abstract and referential, organic and artificial. Her color palette and aesthetics reveal a closer look at Mediterranean craftsmanship and landscape. Ganxillo is a generative piece inspired by her grandmothers practice of crochet textiles. Like crocheting, coding is a step-by-step handcraft, creating patterns and drawings from small geometrical stitchesa never ending, repetitive process; a mantra that generates beauty. When you observe the resulting patterns, several abstract images may emerge, becoming the starting point for new narratives and memories. Press numbers and keys, or click your mouse, to discover the pieces interactive elements.

Ganxillo #50

Joana Moll conceived &ldquo;Ultimate Solvers&rdquo; as a critical reflection on the promises of the technological sector, with companies confidently asserting that all problems can be fixed with large amounts of data and software. While global emergencies such as climate change and the COVID pandemic (not to mention other social, political, and economic crises) cannot be solved with an app, corporations still rely on techno-solutionism, which contributes to the obfuscation of these realities. Blindly relying on technology also prevents users from questioning what lies behind the solutions that these companies are offering, and from questioning how efficient they really are.

The artwork collects a series of slogans, brand identities, and stock images used by the major companies in the IT sector to sell their products. These are endlessly combined and repeated, showing to what extent these sentences are vague, empty of meaning, interchangeable, and generic. However, they also reveal the companies&rsquo; underlying ambition to control and shape the world through information analysis and predictive algorithms, which is a disturbing prospect for a society in which everything has become a resource to extract data and labor from.

&ldquo;Ultimate Solvers&rdquo; was originally commissioned by HeK (Haus der elektronischen K&uuml;nste Basel) as part of the Hek Net Works program.

Ultimate Solvers #36

&ldquo;Predictive Art Bot&rdquo; is an algorithm that automatically generates concepts for artworks by combining keywords from news and article headlines in real time. Conceived by DISNOVATION.ORG and programmed by J&eacute;r&ocirc;me Saint-Clair, the artwork is a constantly updated commentary on the media&rsquo;s influence on artistic trends and discourses, as well as on the widespread expectation of contemporary and new media art to address the social, political, economic, environmental, and cultural issues of our time. The artwork goes even further by suggesting future artworks that could be created from its one-liner descriptions, which are sometimes prophetic and sometimes plainly absurd. Each sentence is disseminated online on a dedicated Twitter account, and can be read as a critique of contemporary art, as some generative nonsense, or as the seed of an actual artistic project. Through algorithmic serendipity, the artwork opens up unlikely associations of ideas that could stimulate unconventional forms of creativity.

Since its original inception in 2015, &ldquo;Predictive Art Bot&rdquo; has taken on many different forms, including an LED sign, an installation, a video projection, and a website. On Feral File, the artwork can be collected as an archive of all the predictions published on Twitter since September 2015. In this iteration, the sentences are displayed randomly, with an indication of the date and time they were published, plus a link to the original tweet.

Predictive Art Bot #36

In &ldquo;Just in case,&rdquo; Thierry Fournier addresses the perception of digital systems as an Other by reversing the relationship between human and machine. Borrowing from the experience of solving captchas, the work sets up a fictional situation where it&rsquo;s considered normal for a machine to detect whether or not someone is human all by itself.

In the piece, the screen shows a message that seems to come from a computer program that wonders if the person who observes it is human (&ldquo;checking you are human&hellip;&rdquo;). It hesitates, calculates, and a wheel turns. Finally, it stops and displays a brief &ldquo;thank you.&rdquo; Then it starts again, ad infinitum. A brief moment of doubt arises while the process runs, which is lifted when the animation starts again&mdash;only to open up more questions.

As an animated GIF, this edition can be easily distributed via social media posts, messages, emails, and any other form of digital communication. In those spaces, it can be experienced outside of an artistic context as a way to hint at humans&rsquo; dystopian relationship with machines, or to question how to define what being human is.

Just in case #36

Working with AI art sometimes feels like gazing into a pond of water. In a still pond, we see a clear, gently blurred version of ourselves staring back at us, while turbulent waters return rippled echoes of our shape. These changing reflections of ourselves are similar to images generated from data, which can be hyperrealistic depictions of the original, or images that are surreal and barely recognizable, as errors creep in. This exhibition looks at the way artists represent nature and humans, using the latest machine learning technologies to conjure seascapes, imaginary marine creatures, autumn leaves, and musings on the human form. Masks and faces akin to the grotesque rear their heads, reminding us of the early errors of these technologies and the eternal human fascination with depicting ourselves. These artists present AI as a tool to craft new reflections on perennial subjects, as well as a creative partner, conjuring new landscapes, creatures, and forms. Luba Elliott

Feral File  Reflections in the Water

&ldquo;Leaves of Manifold, of Red and Gold&rdquo; by Helena Sarin is a piece that focuses on autumn tree leaves, the rich combinations of their color hues, and their seasonal omnipresence. Leaves appear and disappear one by one, presenting a fashion parade to the viewer, the detailed veins and complex color transitions providing a feast for the visual senses. At times the shapes seem to belong to unfamiliar trees, or the leaf stalk may be separated. As is typical in Helena Sarin&rsquo;s practice, these images have been generated by a GAN trained on the artist&rsquo;s own photographs and sketches. Then, Sarin reviews the generated images and manually curates the final selection, acting by the principle &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not the frames you play, it&rsquo;s the frames you don&rsquo;t play,&rdquo; to paraphrase Miles Davis.