Obvious is a French collective of three artists and researchers, Pierre Fautrel, Gauthier Vernier and Hugo Caselles-Dupré, who use artificial intelligence to create art.Formed in 2017, the group builds AI algorithms and uses them to generate images, working at the intersection of academic research and art.,
Obvious came together around a shared interest in the creative potential of artificial intelligence, catalyzed by a member of the group who works as an AI researcher. They named the group Obvious because they wanted to make art that was accessible and understandable to everyone, even people unfamiliar with the technology. Their first body of work, the Belamy Family, used generative adversarial networks trained on a dataset of 15,000 historical portraits to produce eleven fictitious aristocratic portraits.In 2018, Christie's auctioned one of these works, Portrait of Edmond Belamy, for $432,500, the first sale of an AI-generated artwork at a major auction house.,,,Christie's had estimated the work at $7,000 to $10,000 ahead of the sale.The work was generated using a publicly available GAN algorithm written by artist Robbie Barrat, who objected mildly on social media but did not pursue legal action.
The sale brought the group significant exposure and led to exhibitions at major institutions, including the Hermitage Museum, along with a place on Forbes' '30 Under 30' list in 2020.Barrat later criticized the group for what he called intentionally mystifying AI, “to assign an agency to it, and render it less of a tool”.Obvious has released a new series most years since, including Electric Dreams of Ukiyo and a 2020 series of African masks. In 2022, they held their first solo show, 7.1, a series paying tribute to the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.In 2023, the Paris Opera commissioned Obvious to create video works for Emergence, its first NFT collection.
In July 2023, Obvious released Speciesism, 69 live-generated works inspired by a scene in the film Blade Runner in which the character Deckard notices android Rachel's emotions. The series drew on Renaissance frescoes as training data and explored questions about how intelligence is classified across humans, animals and machines.In October 2023, Obvious applied completion algorithms to earlier Speciesism outputs made with Stable Diffusion to create Magenta Garden of Replicant Delights, shown at Kate Vass Galerie's “Node to Node” exhibition in Paris.,In 2024, Obvious collaborated with artist Ivona Tau on AI Index, a set of 100 NFTs on Distributed Gallery's [aside] protocol that unlock according to a gauge tracking public sentiment toward AI.
