Travis LeRoy Southworth (American, b. 1979) is a conceptual artist who treats every image as a system rather than a single picture, working with the operations — retouching gestures, interface symbols, corrective language — that produce it.By day he works as a photo retoucher in the beauty industry, and stockpiles the blemishes, color adjustments and digital masks of that process as raw material for his portraits.
Southworth holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the University of Arizona, and was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. His series Detouched, which uses image manipulation and portraiture, received a Fellowship in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010. In 2013 he took part in a residency in Switzerland involving the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where the collision of subatomic particles to reveal hidden ones inspired a paper he wrote that year proposing the 'colliding' of digital images to form new ones, anticipating the development of AI imagery. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Drawing Center and the Zurich Kunsthalle.
In 2021 he presented “Human Nature Perfectly” at Below Grand NYC, featuring Familiar Faces, a series of soft gestural black-and-white portraits made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.The portraits were built from the black-and-white digital masks he uses in retouching work, which he described as “a quick sketch of a partial face. Something recognizable but at the same time not human”.
Alongside this photographic practice, Southworth has pursued a parallel trajectory into blockchain and AI art since 2017, when he began researching blockchain technology, later incorporating machine learning into his work in 2019.He contributed to the beta testing of SuperRare and of Playform, an early AI image-generation platform, and in 2019 became one of fifty donors of record for Public Key / Private Key, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's blockchain project gifting a film to the Whitney Museum.,His Omnia Ludens series, made with Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, reworks standardized printer test images — mosaics of color and gradients designed to calibrate mechanical reproduction — into fractured, unpredictable compositions such as Beauty in the Breakdown.In 2026 he released Soft Eulogies: Portraits from the Mempool, a generative series of 10,080 skull portraits on Bitcoin Ordinals, each drawn over the exact confirmation time of a real Bitcoin transaction and paired with a phrase declaring something 'dead.'
