Nuclear Samurai is a digital artist whose post-photographic practice uses AI-generated imageryto explore truth in images, identity in the digital era, and the absurdities of how society is structured.His visual style draws on cinematic, subtly surreal photography, a sensibility rooted in years of work as a commercial and studio photographer.
In 2022, following the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, Nuclear Samurai decided to pursue art full time.,That year he began minting on OpenSea and was accepted into the Midjourney beta.His breakthrough came at the end of 2022 with the ten-week narrative collection Nuclear Samurai, which introduced weekly airdrops for collectors and pushed his work toward a more photo-realistic style. His image Eminence, showing a horse amid traffic at twilight, caught the attention of the artist Claire Silver and led to his inclusion in the “Artist x AI 3” exhibition with Superchief Gallery at NFT Paris. For that show he made three further images, The Last Artist, The Last Station, and Lost, all of which sold.
His animated series Glitchcraftcombined glitch and baroque aesthetics with imagery of digital personas and personality homogenization.He won second place in Claire Silver's fourth AI art contest with the short film Consciousness, made with a range of AI tools including Deforum, Stable Diffusion, and Runway ML.BAPTISM, a post-photographic project, used AI-generated documentary-style imagery of a fictional 1996 Manhattan flood to comment on how easily images can be made to look true. Nuclear Samurai later released X FIGURES, a 404-piece project reimagining XCOPY's CC0 artworks as collectible action figures, made by sketching each figure before running it through generative AI tools. He has also released work under the alt identity NUKE, also known as Nukedoteth.
