Artist Statement

Alex Kagan

I have always been interested in art. Also, from my early years, nature captivated me – its beautiful landscapes, cityscapes, trees, and flowers and variety of their shapes, harmony of their elements and intense saturation of their colors were mesmerizing.

Becoming an artist is closely tied to my work as a professional, during a career in which I designed and developed computer aided design systems. I am very interested in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and I always like to stay abreast of new developments, especially as it relates to Visual Art. This has been very rewarding to me, as some newly released applications allowed my long-held dream to come true—the ability to apply my creative though and vision to generating digital artworks. Through this happy meeting of technology and visualization I synthesized my years of experience in computer science with my longing for and love of art.

This process had me looking at the task of “art-making” through the lens, or platform, of contemporary computer programs. Does the program pre-suppose an artist facility with formalistic issues like color and rendering of shape and imagery? Where does the artist’s style take over, or does it? Does the artist imagination play any part in the process of creating artwork, or he or she a slave to the machine? Is it only prerogative of the artist to be inspired or does that ability—often considered transcendent—also belong to the computer? Is it all about changes in input parameters reflect on resulting images?

There are few different applications to make an artwork using AI. These are the tools the contemporary technology help to create an image. 

The image is the printed on photo paper or canvas using special ink.

Recently, I begin to animate my AI created pictures. I consider this as а next important step in development of contemporary art and an opportunity to bring it closer to the public.