Atay Ilgun is a London-based artist, creative technologist and curator whose practice combines artificial intelligence, blockchain-based art, internet folklore and event curation.In 2019 he released Realiti, among the earliest generative adversarial network artworks minted on Ethereum, and has since worked mainly under a long-running multimedia alias exploring artificial intelligence and fictional bureaucracy.
Ilgun runs Wounded Wolf Press, a small publishing house and record label he founded in the UK in 2011 with Gozde Omay, producing chapbooks and handmade editions of poetry, fiction, photography and folk and textural music.Realiti (2019) combined stills from Grimes' music video of the same name with images scraped by web crawlers built around the song's lyrics, and is documented as one of the earliest AI-generated (GAN) artworks minted on Ethereum with its own smart contract, alongside early works by Robbie Barrat and Anna Ridler. In 2025 he released RXALITI, a 500-piece follow-up that returns to older GAN models to generate deliberately degraded, glitch-heavy images.
Since 2021 Ilgun has released music, AI-generated writing and installations under the ongoing project England's Council of Legislation and Governing Body of Hyper Real Simulations and Constructs, known by the acronym ecolagbohrsac2021, which imagines a fictional bureaucratic body overseeing an increasingly synthetic reality.Its debut album, The Only Way We Know to Have Fun, was released in 2021, and its 2023 follow-up, EUPHORIA, extended into live audiovisual shows, physical instruments and a deep-web streaming page.That streaming page can only be accessed within ten metres of Meme-orial Park Bench, an engraved memorial bench he installed in a park in South East London in 2023, unlocked by a QR code using GPS and JavaScript code.For CRYPTOLITH I: The New Magical Renaissance (2022), made with GPT-1, GPT-2 and GPT-3 through OpenAI's beta artist program, he generated a series of fictional leaked government documents, shown in “The Production of Post-Truth” at weareuglyduck in London.
Alongside his own art, Ilgun has worked as a curator, spending three years as assistant curator at IKLECTIK in London before curating independent events, and he received the PRS Foundation's Early Career Promoter Fund to launch a new event series.With the collective Fetchish and Kirill Vilshenko, he produced “NEWPHORIA: The End of Reality Rave” at Corsica Studios in London on 9 August 2024, which included the performance piece PAEAN written by Miedo Total.In 2026 he released Besties on SuperRare, a collection of 300 on-chain creatures generated as SVG code by a large language model rather than an image-based AI model, curated by jonooo.
