Robbie Barrat (b. 1999) is a Dublin-born, West Virginia-raised artist who trains neural networks on curated datasets, using the resulting misinterpretations and distortions as his primary material.,At nineteen, he gained attention for AI Generated Nude Portrait #7 (2018), a GAN trained on nude paintings so that it would never fully learn the human figure, producing surreal, semi-abstract bodies instead.,,
Barrat grew up on a farm in West Virginia, and a Nam June Paik exhibition he saw at age thirteen reshaped how he thought about computers as artistic tools.During his senior year of high school, he trained a neural network to write lyrics in the style of Kanye West, a project that led to a 2017 internship at NVIDIA working on neural networks for self-driving cars.,He has said the internship cemented his sense of himself as an artist.He went on to conduct machine-learning research on drug discovery at Stanford before pursuing independent art projects in New York and attending art school in Saint-Nazaire, France.
In 2018 he minted 300 individual frames from AI Generated Nude Portrait #7 on SuperRare and gifted them to attendees of Christie's Art+Tech Summit in London, distributed as scratch-off cards holding each work's private key.,,Most recipients discarded the cards, and the works became known as “the Lost Robbies”.A 2022 blockchain data analysis found that only 35 of the 300 had ever been claimed, leaving roughly 264 unclaimed or lost.That year Sotheby's sold one of the claimed pieces, AI Generated Nude Portrait #7 Frame #64, for £630,000, a price Barrat found unsettling given the work had originally been a gift.,He has said he minted the giveaway to create abundance rather than scarcity, and was troubled that the ensuing speculation shifted attention from the images themselves to their resale value.
Barrat has since moved away from NFTs and blockchain technology, framing them as a selling mechanism distinct from his creative process.Avant Galerie Vossen invited him to Paris after seeing his nude portraits.For his 2019 debut show “Infinite Skulls” at Avant Galerie Vossen, he trained a neural network on 450 skulls painted by Ronan Barrot, driving a real-time installation that continuously generated and erased new skull images.,,In February 2023, Avant Galerie Vossen presented a retrospective titled “Robbie Barrat 2018-2020”, surveying his work from those years.,In Big Buck Hunter Restoration, he reprograms a hunting video game from his childhood to remove its violence, leaving generative landscapes where deer roam undisturbed.He runs an art and design studio in Paris.
