Memo Akten (Turkish, b. 1975) is an artist, researcher and computer scientist who uses machine learning and code to create moving-image works, installations and performances that explore perception, consciousness and the entanglement of humans, nature and technology.,,He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, on artificial intelligence and human-machine interaction, and teaches computational art and design at the University of California, San Diego.,
Born in Istanbul, Akten trained as a civil engineer before discovering Processing.,He founded the studio MSA Visuals in 2007. It evolved into the collective Marshmallow Laser Feast in 2011. He left in 2014 to concentrate on his own work, collaborations and research.With Quayola, he made Forms, a study of athletes' motion drawn from footage held in Britain's National Media Museum, which won the Golden Nica in the Prix Ars Electronica 2013 Animation category.,,
His Learning to See series, begun in 2017, uses machine learning trained on live cameras to reflect on how self-affirming cognitive biases shape perception and drive social polarization.,Deep Meditations takes a similar approach at larger scale: he trained a neural network on Flickr photographs tagged with words such as life, love, faith and god, then guided its imagined imagery into an hour-long immersive film and installation.His 2015 video Journey through the layers of the mind and his 2021 film All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace show the leap in AI image-generation capability that took place between the Deep Dream and CLIP eras.
In September 2020 Akten published research finding that a single-edition NFT could carry a carbon footprint equivalent to driving a petrol car 1,000 kilometres, prompting Flash Art to gather artists, activists and theorists into a manifesto responding to the finding.He mints his own work only on energy-efficient, proof-of-stake blockchains such as Tezos.His advocacy for the shift helped draw other artists, including Ganbrood, toward Tezos rather than Ethereum.His 2021 collection Distributed Consciousness, 256 AI-generated works minted on Tezos, draws on cephalopod cognition and distributed computation to reflect on artificial intelligence, and to question human exceptionalism amid the climate crisis.,
Commissioned by the Vanhaerents Art Collection, his installation Boundaries, made with Katie Hofstadter, combined AI, computer vision and dance on a 30-foot LED screen at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale, seen by more than 90,000 visitors.That year, his collaboration with Katie Hofstadter, Embodied Simulation, was an official selection of Tribeca Immersive.,With Katie Hofstadter, he created Superradiance (2024), shown at Xtopia Immersive and included in the Creative AI Track at NeurIPS 2025.,
