Digital art is sort of a vague term: GIFs? EDM? Photoshop? There are tons of genres of digital art, so we like to think of it this way:
Art in which digital technology is central to the creative process.
Still pretty vague, right? Some would say necessarily so. Computers-and the technologies we’ve built with them-have opened up huge new realms of possibility. Machine intelligence (think IBM’s Watson or Google Brain) is at the forefront of these new discoveries. It enables us to create in ways never even imagined.
There are a few brave souls looking to find out just what we’re capable of: look below for a need-to-know list of artists leading the field in machine intelligence.
Rosa Menkmann
Menkmann is a glitch-based artist and curator. She uses pixel-sorting techniques and image compression techniques for exploring different aesthetics.
Laetitia Sonami
Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist and performer known for her instrument “The Lady’s Glove.” It uses sensors on her hand to create generative sound performances.
Robert Thomas
A sound artist and procedural audio expert, Robert Thomas has worked on projects such as RjDj and Fantom w/ Massive Attack. He uses algorithmic processing of smartphone sensors (gyrometers, GPS, and accelerometers) to transform musical composition.
Memo Akten
Lasers, robotics, dancers, and neural networks: for Memo, computation is the medium itself. A major player in open-source, he’s contributed to both Processing and openFrameworks. Memo’s digital artmaking process is simple: “I start by defining a set of rules and then I play.” [ Editor’s note: Memo did an eye-opening interview with us a few months ago: read it .]
Parag Mital
Parag is our Director of Machine Intelligence, as well as a groundbreaking computational artist. He uses film, eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI recordings to build models of audiovisual perception. His artistic practice explores these models using generative collage processes. Above: Paul Klee’s painting style, applied to video out of a car window. Check out his course on Creative Applications of Deep Learning with TensorFlow.
Rebecca Fiebrink
Rebecca Fiebrink is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as a Kadenze instructor. She invented her own open-source software, , to make machine learning creative and interactive.
Golan Levin
Golan Levin created some of the earliest digital art, combining computer vision and installation artwork. He’s continued his practice as Project Manager for , a visual search tool for satellite imagery. As the Director of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU, he also organizes events like WEIRD REALITY, which focuses on VR and AR practices.
Philippe Pasquier
An associate professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU, Pasquier conducts artistic research focusing “building deeper theories for endowing machines with autonomous behaviours, with a focus on creative and artistic applications.” Check out his Kadenze course, Generative Art and Computational Creativity.
Mike Tyka
Mike Tyka is a digital artist working with sculpture, painting, as well as a researcher at Google that helped develop Deep Dream and Inceptionism.
Adam Ferriss
A trained photographer who works in the dark room of Otis College, Adam Ferriss applies state-of-the-art code for generative image synthesis. Neural networks create strange artifacts and new aesthetics within his own photographs.
Allison Parrish
Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer who lives in Brooklyn. Her teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet.
gives you a location-based, randomly generated travel guide, drawing sentences from Wikivoyage.
Kyle McDonald
Kyle McDonald is an artist who works in the open with code. He is a contributor to arts-engineering toolkits like openFrameworks, and spends a significant amount of time building tools that allow artists to use new algorithms in creative ways.
Lauren McCarthy
Lauren McCarthy is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work explores current social and technological systems and structures for being a person and interacting with other people. [ Editor’s note: check out our interview with Lauren .]
Gene Kogan
Kogan is a programmer and artist working with Machine Learning, who also teaches on the topic with a digital art focus.
Mario Klingemann
A code artist at the Google Cultural Institute, Mario Klingemann works with Deep Learning and large image datasets to make huge, stunning digital art.
Matthew Yee-King
A musician who works on sound synthesis using evolutionary and genetic algorithms.
Marco Donnarumma
Marco is a performer and Pure Data afficionado. His digital art practice is all about corporealism, using sensors placed on his body. He realizes his work through machine intelligence, signal processing, and algorithmic music composition. He also started his own company using the technology he has built called Xth-Sense, which has previously won the Guntham Music Instrument Prize.
If you want to learn more about deep learning/machine learning and digital art techniques, enroll in the course below:
Creative Applications of Deep Learning with TensorFlow
Kadenze Academy
Originally published at https://blog.kadenze.com on September 9, 2016.
