🔒 Painting with thoughts

Magda Żuk: Obvious became well-known in 2018 due to an auction at New York’s Christie’s, where the Portrait of Edmond de Belamy was sold.. How did it happen that you, together with Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier, created a collective that made the front pages of newspapers?

Hugo Caselles-Dupré: Obvious is primarily a story of our friendship, which began in our childhood. At one point, we decided to do something creative together. We were both 25 years old, and I had just started researching machine learning and artificial intelligence. Then I came across an article about GAN (Generative Adversarial Networks). The results we could achieve with these algorithms completely surprised us. We understood that AI can be a tool for creating art, but important questions also arose.
Who is the artist in this process? What does it actually mean to create using algorithms? We wanted to spark a discussion, so we created the series La Famille de Belamy – portraits generated by AI, each signed with the mathematical formula of the algorithm that created it. This was meant to challenge the traditional understanding of authorship.