Stephan Vasement is a Bangkok-based visual artistwhose AI-generated work forms bichromatic scenes built around fierce animal motifs and a surrealistic brushstroke.He calls himself a second-wave AI artist, a term he uses for those who began working with tools such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
Vasement began collecting code-based generative art on various blockchains in 2021.The next year he started experimenting with AI tools alongside friends, discovering the clip-guided diffusion model Disco Diffusion in the summer of 2022. At first the group simply sold their images to each other for a symbolic fee on Objkt and Versum before the community around them began to grow. In July 2022 he launched his C Series on Objkt, after modifying Midjourney's own algorithm to produce a style he says no one else was working with at the time. By early 2023 he had produced nearly 500 works in the series. He was preparing a follow-up release on the platform Foundation that would build on the series in a new direction.
Working across Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, he draws on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Peter Greenaway and Robert Bresson, as well as on music, to build a mysterious, cinematic atmosphere around his images.Vasement has said animals are a convenient vessel for negative emotions such as anger, rage and bitterness, giving him a layer of artistic distance from the feelings themselves. His work also explores ideas of bodily transcendence, imagining a violent, mutated future for humanity.In 2023 he took part in the group exhibitions “AI Metaverse: Where Imagination Meets Technology” on MakersPlaceand “Deep Fake”, a Superchief Gallery NFT exhibition staged at its Los Angeles gallery in collaboration with the AI art collective MAIF.
