Helena Sarin is a visual artist and software engineer who trains generative adversarial networks on her own drawings, watercolors and photographs to create art she calls neural bricolage.,,Born in Moscow and based in New Jersey, she worked for years as an engineer, first at Bell Labs and then as an independent computer vision consultant, before turning to generative art full time.,,
Sarin models her generative work on flowers, fruit, bottles and other everyday objects, drawing on an earlier practice in food and drink styling, fashion and photography.,Her images and titles are often laced with puns and wordplay, a habit she traces to the way the Russian intelligentsia used puns and jokes to subvert authority.Russian Constructivism also informs her visual language.She describes herself as an “engineering artist”, a term adapted from the Japanese word kogei, which translates as craft.,
In 2019 Sarin self-published The Book of GANesis, the First Ever AI Artist Book, training her AI models on her own drawings and sketches to originate a genre she called the GANcomic.A year later she released a second AI art book, GANcommedia Erudita: #scarabocchiLatenti, through MakersPlace in partnership with Kate Vass Galerie.In 2020 she also began gen2GAN, a collaboration with the artist Dmitri Cherniak in which his software generated thousands of uncurated images that fed into an AI system she trained, releasing a limited-edition book in 2023.
Sarin's artwork was exhibited in Kate Vass Galerie's “Automat und Mensch” show in Zurich in 2019.Her 2023 piece Unjoin: On the Raucous Edge of Stability, a GAN animation built from her landscape and black-and-white drawings, was shown in Unit London's “The Perfect Error” exhibition.Beginning in 2024 she extended her practice into ceramics, hand-painting tumblers with designs drawn from her GAN imagery in a process she calls potteryGAN. She presented the sixteen-piece collection Vectors on the Rocks with ARTXCODE in New York that year.
