Xander Steenbrugge is a Belgian machine learning researcher, YouTuber, and digital artist based in Ghent.,He discovered the field through his master's thesis on brain-computer interfaces and went on to lead the applied research division at the Belgian AI company ML6.
As a freelancer he turned to generative media, creating tools for creative expression and human-machine collaboration, including WZRD, a video creation platform built from his work on audio-reactive visuals.,His 2019 video When AI generated paintings dance to music... drew more than 43,000 views and was included in the NeurIPS AI Art Gallery. In 2021 he began experimenting with OpenAI's CLIP model and released DreamScapes, a 500-work BrainDrops NFT collection on OpenSea combining sharply detailed fantasy imagery with short video explorations. Its titles are drawn directly from the text prompts used to generate the works, such as The brilliant crystal and My ideas are twisting. For Steenbrugge, “the code is the art”, and small implementation details can dramatically change the creative outcome.
Steenbrugge met fellow machine-learning artist Gene Kogan in 2020 at Mars College, an experimental pop-up village in the California desert, after both had used tools such as StyleGAN and CLIP before they reached the mainstream. The two went on to co-found Eden, a platform for developing autonomous AI agents that participate in the cultural economy, building on Kogan's earlier autonomous AI artist project Abraham. Steenbrugge has described Eden's creative agents, including Abraham and the agent Solienne, as sharing a single platform while looking and feeling distinct from one another.
