Ivona Tau — VISIONS: reflected at Sotheby's and AI-generative practice

2021

Artists: Ivona Tau · Year: 2021 · Medium: AI-generative art — custom GANs trained on the artist's own analog and digital photography · Substrate: StyleGAN2-ADA training; Python; curated training corpora of personal photography · Place: Vilnius, Lithuania · Institution: Sotheby's (Boundless Space, 2021); HTNFT Gallery, Warsaw Ivona Tau is a Lithuanian AI-generative artist (b. 1990, Vilnius) with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology and roughly fifteen years of combined professional photography and AI-research practice — a rare combination of credentials that places her closer to research-informed AI art than to image-generator-driven practice. Her work has been published in computer-vision and neural-network research venues alongside its exhibition history. VISIONS: reflected, sold at Sotheby's Boundless Space sale in September 2021 for $22,680, was one of the early auction results that established AI-generated work — specifically GAN-trained-on-personal-photography work — as a category collectors at a tier-one auction house would underwrite. The piece was generated from training a GAN on Tau's own combined corpus of analog film and digital photography; the output is identifiably a Tau image because the training data is identifiably her image-making. The work is in the same lineage as Helena Sarin's self-trained-dataset practice and Anna Ridler's manually-labeled tulip work — AI art whose authorial position is grounded in the artist's own production of training material. Mythic Latent Glitches, released in 2022 as a 333-token collection, extended the practice into a more structurally elaborate piece. Tau trained a StyleGAN2-ADA model on her photography of forests near Vilnius, then applied five algorithmic distortion techniques (perspective warps, scan lines, color burns, tile misplacements, TV overlays) to twenty-three curated seed outputs. Roughly thirty percent of the collection is browser-interactive. A solo show at HTNFT Gallery in Warsaw accompanied the release. Tau's awards record — Best Award Digital Ars 2020, Computer Animation award at Computer Space International Forum 2021, Top 10 Women in AI 2022 (Women in Tech Foundation) — and acquisitions by the ZKM Karlsruhe and the Francisco Carolinum (Linz) anchor the work inside the European institutional AI-art conversation. She is represented by MTArt Agency and Kate Vass Galerie. Lore Tau has spoken about her shift from working as a professional photographer to training neural networks on her own photography as a deliberate methodological move — she wanted the GAN's outputs to argue with her photographic habits, not to imitate them. The forest training set used for Mythic Latent Glitches was photographed near her home in Vilnius across several seasons; the regional specificity of the source images is part of why the GAN outputs read as Lithuanian rather than as generic forest imagery. Sources • Tau, Ivona — ivonatau.com (bio). • Tau, Ivona — VISIONS: reflected project page. • Tau, Ivona — Mythic Latent Glitches project page. • MTArt Agency — Ivona Tau. • MakersPlace — Paganism, Machine Hearts, and Shooting Training Data interview (2024).