Machines Dream in Color: Artists Who Taught AI to Imagine
Long before AI chatbots became household names, a handful of artists were already inviting artificial intelligence into their studios—not as rivals, but as creative partners.
Memo Akten, for example, drew inspiration from the distributed intelligence of octopuses, using neural networks to probe the boundaries of consciousness and creativity. Sougwen Chung blurred the line between human and machine by performing live with AI-driven robots that learned her drawing style, creating a duet of code and gesture. In Senegal, Linda Dounia trained AI not on internet images, but on her own abstract paintings, challenging both the technology’s biases and its capacity for spontaneity. Meanwhile, Jake Elwes used deepfake drag cabarets to expose the blind spots of facial recognition, giving marginalized identities a digital stage. Anna Ridler and Jenna Sutela, too, have woven history, language, and biology into their AI collaborations, questioning who controls the narrative of technology.
In the hands of these artists, AI isn’t just a tool—it’s a mirror, reflecting both the promise and the peculiarities of human imagination.
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