Mario Klingemann — Early GAN practice — Neurography and Memories of Passersby I

2015

Artists: Mario Klingemann · Year: 2015 · Medium: Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and neural-network art · Substrate: StyleGAN, BigGAN, custom-trained models; outputs as prints, video, and real-time installations · Place: Munich, Germany · Institution: Independent Mario Klingemann began working with generative adversarial networks in 2015, within weeks of Ian Goodfellow's original GAN paper being widely understood. He is, by most accounting, the first practicing artist to have adopted GAN methods seriously and to have produced a substantial body of work with them. His Neurography series from 2015 onward — unsettling portraits generated by networks trained on face datasets, with the networks' failure modes made visible — is the earliest mature AI-art practice in this archive. Klingemann's Memories of Passersby I (2018) was auctioned by Sotheby's in March 2019 for £40,000, making it one of the earliest AI-generated artworks sold at a major auction house. (It was preceded only by the Obvious collective's Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, sold at Christie's in October 2018 for $432,500, though the Obvious piece drew substantial criticism for unattributed use of Robbie Barrat's open-source code.) What Klingemann has argued across a decade of practice is that neural networks have specific aesthetic properties — modes of failure, characteristic distortions, learned-feature idioms — that artists should develop in their own terms rather than treating as mere tools. His work is consistently about what GANs themselves do, not about using them to produce imagery in other styles. He continues to work. He is based in Munich and has been a prolific blogger and Twitter presence, which has made his process unusually transparent. Lore Klingemann trained as a designer before turning to AI art. He has published the source code and training methods for most of his work, which has made him one of the field's most influential pedagogical figures. Sotheby's 2019 sale of Memories of Passersby I was the first live auction-house sale of an AI artwork generated with the artist's own custom-trained models (rather than with borrowed open-source code). He has been a consistent critic of superficial AI-art practice that treats neural networks as style-transfer filters. Sources • Klingemann, Mario — quasimondo.com archive • Sotheby's — Memories of Passersby I sale (March 2019) • Klingemann Twitter / Mastodon — process documentation