Paris Photo 2024 - In Collaboration with Fellowship: Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst and Trevor Paglen

Louise Alexander Gallery/AFP, in collaboration with Fellowship, is delighted to present a showcase at Paris Photo 2024. This exhibition delves into the transformative potential of AI in art, offering a visionary exploration of creativity and technology that challenges the conventions of artistic expression.

When approaching a new artistic medium like AI, it’s essential to consider the evolution of photography. Over its nearly 200-year history, photography has transformed from a mechanical process into an integral part of contemporary art, shaping how we perceive the world. This transformation mirrors the journey AI art is undergoing today. We have focused on key moments in AI art, from Harold Cohen’s early rule-based AI experiments to the first text-to-image model created by 19-year-old Elman Mansimov in 2015.

This year, the exhibition presents three critical bodies of work, deepening our exploration into what AI art is and what it can become. These works, from Trevor Paglen, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, highlight one of the most dynamic periods in generative AI art (2015-2024) and reveal the interplay between human creativity and machine learning.

Trevor Paglen’s Evolved Hallucinations is a simultaneous artistic and scientific investigation into GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) models. By organizing his work into corpuses, classes, and neurons, Paglen exposes the limitations and biases of AI image-making systems. His exploration of the AI "black box" invites viewers to reflect on the ways machine learning translates data into imagery, raising questions about the relationship between human perception and machine vision.

Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst’s Infinite Images, created in collaboration with DALLE-1, explores themes of labor, art, and utopian landscapes through early text-to-image technology. Developed during the pandemic, this series reflects their experimental process as they pushed the boundaries of what early AI tools could achieve. The resulting images are eclectic and raw, representing a pioneering moment in AI-generated art. As they describe, “We can’t emphasize enough how surreal the experience was... it felt like we were holding a secret.”

Herndon & Dryhurst’s xHairyMutantx continues their inquiry into AI’s role in cultural production. Presented at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, xHairyMutantx is an interactive text-to-image model that invites the public to engage with AI-driven image creation. This work underscores the collaborative potential between artists, machines, and audiences, demonstrating AI’s evolving role as not just a tool, but an active participant in shaping artistic expression.

Through these three seminal works, Fellowship continues its curatorial mission of examining how AI, much like photography, will transform the way we see the world. Our exhibition at Paris Photo 2024 invites viewers to explore the relationship between these two mediums and engage in the broader debate on AI’s impact on artistic creation.