Christie’s will maintain an public sale devoted solely to artwork created with synthetic intelligence (AI), the primary of its variety at a significant public sale home. Open for bids from 20 February to five March, the Augmented Intelligence sale will embrace greater than 20 heaps spanning over 5 a long time, from pioneering AI artists of the Nineteen Sixties to up to date works.
Artists represented within the sale embrace AI artwork pioneers like Refik Anadol, Harold Cohen, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Alexander Reben and Claire Silver. Solely 26% of the gross sales shall be made up of digitally native works like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), in line with Christie’s, with the remainder being gentle bins and screens, in addition to sculptures, work and prints. The public sale home estimates the sale will herald no less than $600,000.
One of many highlights shall be a 12-ft-tall robotic by Reben that can make an oil portray in Christie’s Rockefeller Heart area in the course of the public sale. With every new on-line bid the work receives, the robotic will paint a brand new canvas part, guided by Reben’s AI mannequin. Bids begin at $100, and the robotic will fill out the canvas as the worth will increase.
Pindar Van Arman’s Rising Faces (2017) Courtesy Christie’s
One other notable lot shall be Van Arman’s Rising Faces (2017), from a sequence that makes use of two AI programmes concurrently—one that’s directed to color a human face and one other that stops the work as quickly because it recognises the picture as a human face. The outcomes are haunting, summary portraits which can be among the many first work created by neural networks, a sort of AI that processes and learns from knowledge.
Additionally up on the market is husband-and-wife duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s two Embedding Research (2024) works that have been included within the 2024 Whitney Biennial. That includes a cartoonish character in a puffy spacesuit, the works have been created with a text-to-image AI mannequin directed to supply variations of Herndon’s look. Christie’s estimates the works will promote for between $70,000 and $90,000.
Christie’s will settle for cryptocurrency as cost for almost all of heaps (93%) within the sale.
In November, Sotheby’s New York offered a portray by Ai-Da, a humanoid robotic powered by AI, for greater than $1m with charges.
