Hannu Töyrylä is an artist who uses AI-based image generation to create visually interesting works that reflect his inner world and the complexities of contemporary reality. His images often read like snapshots from a story that mixes reality with dream, documenting a specific time and place while carrying a timeless, recurring quality.
Before turning to art, he earned an M.Sc. in electronics and telecommunications and spent 30 years working as an expert in mobile networks and software development. He also pursued a humanistic path, completing a PhD thesis on the situation of Jews between Christian and Muslim civilizations in medieval times. His artistic practice spans literary, musical and visual arts, and draws on both his technical and humanistic backgrounds. He has published two books on his AI-based artistic work in Finnish, including Alussa on kuva (In the beginning is an image) in 2024.
From 2018 to 2020 he worked mainly with GAN models that he coded and trained himself on his own images, generating new works from visual features learned in training. He later applied the same approach with diffusion models trained on small, visually consistent datasets over one or two days, and released the resulting software on GitHub as urdiffusion.In Confused cityscapes (2021–2022) he combined slices of real places into constantly shifting composite scenes that resembled nowhere in particular.
His solo exhibition “Faces and memories” (Helsinki, 2020) examined how his originally private sphere of contacts and memories had become mixed with the public sphere, pairing new prints tied to specific years with two installations, visions from 1979 and 2019.His exhibition “Unstable Views” (Lahti, Finland, 2024) presented interactive, slowly changing cityscape images that let viewers turn a dial to shift between blended, dreamlike views.
