Tom White is an AI artist based in Wellington, New Zealand,,whose work investigates what he calls the Algorithmic Gaze, how machines see, know and describe the world.He built a drawing system that lets neural networks generate their own abstract ink prints of everyday objects, such as a rabbit or a banana, choosing the composition, line placement and color themselves.
White studied AI more than 25 years ago, taking courses at MIT that included classes taught by Marvin Minsky, Rodney Brooks and Deb Roy. In the late 1990s, working at the MIT Media Lab alongside Casey Reas, Golan Levin and Ben Fry, he took part in the shared coding experiments that grew into the Processing and openFrameworks toolkits. He has named Myron Krueger, for whom he worked as an intern, Karl Sims and Harold Cohen as early influences, alongside the 1920s painter Stuart Davis. By the mid-2010s, as deep learning began to show its potential, White committed more deeply to using it in his art.
His project Perception Engines and the related Treachery of ImageNet grew from this drawing system, producing abstract prints that are reliably recognized not only by the neural network that generated them but broadly across other AI vision systems.,Prints from this system have been independently verified as recognizable by both Google's and Amazon's image recognition systems. A cell phone photo of the same prints can still be misread by other systems entirely, such as an image of his Banana print once classified as food.His 2018 series SYNTHETIC ABSTRACTIONS became the first release in objkt's curatorial PIONEERS program, dedicated to paradigmatic works in the history of digital art.His work Crimson Dream highlights how an abstract brown-and-purple shape can still be flagged as offensive by online content filters, even five years after it was made.
White teaches computational design and creative AI as a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington's School of Design.,Over more than two decades, his work has been shown at MoMA in New York and, in 2019, at Kate Vass Galerie's “Automat und Mensch” exhibition in Zurich, where he showed Electric Fan.
