By guiding neural networks and curating the outcome, I interrogate the boundaries between photography and classical and contemporary art forms. In a time where the machines we built start to look more and more like us, in my work I am asking whether humans are modeling artificial intelligences after their own minds, or are we in fact realizing our brains are much more like machines than we ever thought? By forcing neural networks to interpret artistic expressions and cultural icons, and exploring the effect their output has on the viewer, I am hoping to get a closer understanding of the essence of creativity and the human consciousness.

Bas Uterwijk, (1968, Amsterdam, the Netherlands) has a background in special effects, 3D animation, videogames and photography. Mostly self-taught, he has always been involved in forms of visual storytelling that imitate and distort reality. Since 2019 he combined his different skills and experiences when he started working with generative adversarial networks (GANs) : Deep learning, Artificial Intelligence based software that interprets and synthesizes photographs. With the help of these neural networks, he constructed photos that were never recorded by an actual camera. Portraits of people that lived before the camera was invented or people that never existed. Since early 2021, he has been minting Non Fungible Tokens on the Tezos blockchain. His latest series of artworks are more abstract: "pseudo-figurative" pieces in which he interrogates GANs on creativity and their ability to unbalance human visual recognition.