“The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.” - Marcel Duchamp, 1958

When Marcel Duchamp first started displaying his readymades in the early twentieth century, he sparked a conversation around the distinguishing criteria for something to be considered a work of art. Notions of authorship, process, politics, taste, and creativity were foregrounded in a way that is emerging again today as AI Art becomes more prevalent in contemporary art scenes. 'A Kind of Alchemy': The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence considers the medium of AI Art and its developing tools, such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, along with the artists who are at the heart of this experimentation and emerging practice. 

For this exhibition, a virtual reality installation was designed in Mozilla Hubs to showcase selected works along with interviews and other publications that explore recent themes in AI Art. Curated by Emily Lawhead and Francesca Albrezzi, the exhibition opened in June of 2023.

Participating artists are based internationally and include:

Julia Albrecht, Sveta Bilyk, Maria Björkdahl, Sean Capone, Dennis Delgado, Dekker Dreyer (Phantom Astronaut), Héctor González, Mirabelle Jones, Olga Klimovitskaya, George Legrady, Patrick Lichty, Richard Lundquist, Tannon Reckling, Jacob Riddle, Kenneth Russo and WAAI, Eryk Salvaggio, Guli Silberstein, Nanut Thanapornrapee, Konstantine Tsafatinos, Kevin Yatsu, and Lidiya Zelke.

Please read more about them in the bios below.

As part of the exhibition, artists were asked to share their thoughts on new AI visual production tools as part of the Tower of Babel installation and visitors were invited to submit their own thoughts. This initiative remains open. Click below to listen to those recordings or submit your own reflections on AI to the repository.

Featured Artists