Ganbrood (Dutch, b. 1968) is the name under which Bas Uterwijk makes AI-generated portraits and pseudo-figurative compositions, using generative adversarial networks and diffusion models to construct images that were never captured by a camera. Working at the intersection of photography and synthetic image-making, his practice probes how recognition and belief form around a picture, and how far authenticity can be simulated.
Uterwijk was born and raised in Amsterdam, the child of an actor and a designer. He began in special effects and 3D animation in the 1990s, working on film and television projects before spending three years as an art director for Guerrilla Games on the Killzone series. He then worked for around thirteen years as a documentary and reportage photographer. When the pandemic halted his photography income, a friend introduced him to Artbreeder, and he began experimenting with BigGAN and StyleGAN to reconstruct historical figures from paintings. Reconstructions of Napoleon and Jesus went viral on Instagram and were picked up by media outlets worldwide. He joined Hic et Nunc on Tezos in its early weeks of 2021, after deciding against Ethereum for its energy use, and later began minting on Ethereum as well.
