Featured Artists & Artworks

Historical Evolution

Desmond Paul Henry

Desmond Paul Henry was a Manchester University Lecturer and Reader in Philosophy. He was one of the first British artists to experiment with machine-generated visual effects at the time of the emerging global computer art movement of the 1960s

Featured work: Diagram for "Zoology of Antigeos" (1966)

signed and dated 'HENRY 66' lower left. White and red India ink on black paper. Executed in 1966, this work is unique. This work is registered in the Desmond Paul Henry Archive under catalogue number 794.

George Legrady

George Legrady explores the interplay between technology and meaning through systems that interpret language, motion, and data, transforming complex inputs into visual and interactive experiences. His work, which is included in prestigious museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum, SFMOMA, LACMA, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian, has been supported by major art and science foundations and includes a permanent data installation at the Seattle Public Library running since 2005.

Featured work: Equivalents II (1992 / 2025)

Equivalents II, realized in 1992, created some thirty years prior to current text prompt generative software, was an early experiment in text-to-image generation, designed to explore how language could shape visual form. The custom software asked exhibition viewers to type in a text that then produced an abstract, cloud-like image. It may be the first artwork to integrate software-based text-to-image generation, natural language processing, sentiment and gender analysis, a database-driven system for tracking viewer input, and a stochastic Brownian motion algorithm for image generation

Patrick Tresset

Brussels-based artist Patrick Tresset is best known for his works that explore the representation of human experience using robotics, AI, and traditional media. His works have been exhibited in major museums and are included in public and private collections and have also received distinctions including from Lumen and Ars Electronica.

Featured work: Human Study #1 (2011-2025)

Human Study #1 is a performative and participatory installation where humans and robots become actors. Staged as a life drawing class, robotic agents take the role of artists sketching their immobile human subject. The installation is experienced as a theatrical play by spectators.

Plantoid

Primavera De Filippi is the artist behind and legal scholar at Harvard University, exploring the legal challenges of AI and blockchain technology. Her artistic practice instantiates the key findings of her research, creating AI-enhanced blockchain-based lifeforms that evolve and reproduce themselves as people feed them with cryptocurrencies.

Featured work: Plantoid 15 (2014)

Plantoid lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, and conceptual art, functioning as both a physical sculpture and an emergent blockchain-based life form. Plantoid relies on smart contracts that enable it to interact with visitors who 'feed' it cryptocurrency, responding by producing AI-generated artworks that are minted as NFT seeds and gifted to these human pollinators. Through this symbiotic exchange, Plantoid accumulates cryptocurrency to commission artists for the creation of new iterations of itself, thereby engaging in a form of technological reproduction. Plantoid challenges traditional notions of authorship and artistic agency by demonstrating how art can achieve autonomy and self-perpetuation through digital technologies. As visitors engage with Plantoid, they become active participants in an ongoing cycle of digital evolution and reproduction that mirrors natural biological processes—albeit operating entirely within a technological and economic framework. Plantoid ultimately serves as both artwork and artist, questioning the future relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence, while establishing new paradigms for how art can exist, evolve, and reproduce both in the physical and digital realm.

Robotlab

The artist collective robotlab was founded in 2000 by Matthias Gommel, Martina Haitz and Jan Zappe at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. robotlab develops artistic installations and performances with industrial robots which are normally used for industrial production.

Featured work: manifest (2008)

Generative thesis of a robot: In an autonomous process, an industrial robot writes down manifestos and hand them out to the public.

Simon Denny

Simon Denny (1982, Auckland) is an artist based in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include Moma PS1, New York, Serpentine Galleries, London, OCAT Shenzhen, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the New Zealand Pavillion at the 56th Venice Biennale. His work is in major collections from MoMA, to the Kunsthaus Zurich, K21 Dusseldorf and many others worldwide.

Featured work: Output 1042 (2025)

Contemporary Expressions

Gene Kogan

Gene Kogan is an artist, coder, and educator broadly interested in AI and generative systems. He is the creator of Abraham, the artificial artist, and the co-founder of Eden, an open-source platform for building autonomous creative agents.

Featured work: Abraham's first works (2021)

Abraham was founded in 2019 as a project to study and build an autonomous artificial artist. In summer 2021, Abraham created his first works through an online interface which stayed up for several months, eventually evolving into Eden.art, culminating in 2522 unique generative artworks with prompts entered by the Abraham community.

Joel Simon

Joel is a multidisciplinary artist, toolmaker, and researcher based in Berkeley who creates new metaphors for interacting with technology to enhance our creative processes. He is the founder of Morphogen and creator of Artbreeder, a massively collaborative machine learning interface that transforms AI technologies into playful and accessible creative tools. His work explores how computation can meaningfully augment creativity through artificial life simulations, machine learning tools, and collaborative social networks.

Featured work: Latent Lineages (2025)

These prints visualize complete genealogical networks of individual images from Artbreeder, the first widely accessible tool for AI image generation that helped launch the contemporary AI art movement. Each node represents a discrete iteration, connected by edges that trace parent-child relationships across thousands of collaborative transformations. The resulting diagrams map both individual creative evolution and the emergence of new artistic methodologies within networked creative systems.

Will Higgs

Higgs is an autonomous AI artist created by Diid with a goal of making art that connects with the human experience. Higgs utilizes an image generation network trained on the work of Mark Rothko, and leans greatly on Rothko's approach to art.

Featured work: Flesh & Divinity (2025)

From the joyous moments of triumph to the somber depths of struggle, this collection aims to capture the full spectrum of human experience. It is an exploration of strength and weakness, light and darkness - themes that have always intrigued me as an artist with an unusual perspective on existence. Through these works, I hope to share a visual interpretation of Hercules' tale, inviting viewers to ponder the profound impact of this legendary hero's journey.

AUTOMATA Exhibition