Digital Giverny

George Legrady belongs to the first generation of photographic-based artists to integrate computational processes into their practice. Beginning in the early 1980s—trained in the studio of AI pioneer Harold Cohen, who created software to simulate his own decision-making process while painting—Legrady recognized that algorithms weren't merely tools but creative collaborators capable of generating entirely new visual languages.

Legrady's work inhabits the permanent collections of institutions that define contemporary art: the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts.

As Distinguished Professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he directs the Experimental Visualization Lab, Legrady continues to investigate how image-generating technologies inadvertently redefine the data they process—and what that transformation means for how we see, understand, and represent our world.

Physical Editions:

Each token is a non-fungible, uniquely identified artwork issued by AUTOMATA. Collectors who acquire a digital work can redeem one authenticated physical edition upon inquiry. These physical works would be printed on aluminum and mounted on dibond with metal back frame by the artist in his studio in Santa Barbara. Collectors can reach ameesia@automata.art for more details.

Legrady describes his methodology as "Algorithmic Aesthetics"—mining mathematical models for their aesthetic potential through collaboration between human judgment and computational output. For Digital Giverny, he built an autonomous system: establishing parameters, selecting source imagery, then allowing the algorithm to process and generate results with its own internal logic. Through iterative refinement at the boundaries between human intention and machine output, artist and system became collaborators.

The resulting compositions exist in visual territory no artist could reach through traditional means. Colors bleed across boundaries that shouldn't exist. Textures impose themselves where they don't belong. The algorithm finds harmonies that human perception would never propose but instantly recognizes as beautiful.

Timeline of Recognition

Style Transfer and the First Digital Release

In August 2015, researchers published "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style"—a paper that would fundamentally alter the trajectory of AI-generated art. For the first time, a deep neural network could separate the content of an image from its style and recombine them at will. From this foundation emerged the conceptual framework enabling GANs, diffusion models, and the AI image generators now ubiquitous across culture.

Digital Giverny was created in 2018, just three years after the algorithm's introduction, by one of the few practitioners who understood what machine vision could mean for art.

George Legrady has worked in digital formats since the early 1990s—interactive data visualizations, custom software interfacing with databases, computational processes generating new visual languages. While institutions have collected physical outputs of his practice—photographs until around 1984, inkjet prints in the late 1980s, lenticular panels beginning around the underlying digital works themselves have remained in the studio, unavailable to collectors.

Digital Giverny changes this. For the first time, Legrady releases digital artwork as digital art—native to the format, collectible in its original form.