Part One I have always loved museums. Ever since I was a small child, I’ve felt at home in a museum — even when the museum in question literally had my people (or our bones) on display behind glass (I am Seneca-Cayuga Nation on my mom’s side). Sometimes people are…

If you think NFTs are scammy/bad, wait until you learn about the art market — With the recent crash in crypto markets and the gnat-like attention span of major media outlets, the fervor around NFTs has subsided a bit in recent months. It’s hard to remember now, but earlier this spring they were all anyone could talk about. So last semester, when passions were running…

The AI of the Beholder — People used to think horses ran like dogs, bounding forward with all four legs off the ground. If you look at early depictions of galloping horses, before the advent of photography, you’ll see a lot of images showing horses in the full stride as imagined by the artists of the…

AI images are less like paintings and more like funhouse mirrors — In the summer of 2015, Google’s AI Blog introduced the world to one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of artistic AI: the puppy-slug. In truth, the puppy-slug is not one image, nor is it even a single character. Rather, “puppy-slug” refers to the unsettling psychedelia…

The uncanny valley is one of the most famous ideas from the field of digital aesthetics. First identified by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori (and coined in English by Mori’s translator Jessica Reichardt), the concept describes the tendency for people to experience an unease, bordering on revulsion, when confronting something that…

Dadaism, the 20th Century absurdist art movement, has been reinvigorated by 21st-century tools — The conventional line on Dadaism (the influential early-20th c. art movement) is that it was a cultural response to the horror and absurdity of the First World War, which had just decimated Europe. Amid the rubble and destruction, a growing sense of disillusionment and nihilism took hold as a generation…

Whenever something smokes, smolders, flows, or flocks, it’s a safe bet there’s a particle system at work — What does data look like? For many people, the word conjures images of spreadsheets, JSON files, or reams of paper printed out on continuous stationery. But in recent years another visual language for data has emerged, eclipsing all others: dots. When you see a screen or a page with loads…

I made my first website in 2000, as a student at George Mason University. I bought the domain Studioamelia.com and I have had that domain as my art space, I called it Studioamelia.com: Virtual Studio Space. Over the years I have had a lot of different jobs, opportunities, and life…

Millions of images generated with code have fueled the engine of a new economy. But modern art has been associated with a lot of shenanigans over the years — is AI art the dawn of a new era, or the art world’s latest prank? — Generative Art uses techniques from Machine Learning and Machine Vision to generate images. And it has produced a lot of headlines around the subject of what is and isn’t real art.