For its newest “Energy” challenge, New York Journal commissioned Berlin-based artist Simon Denny as an example the article “So Few Folks, So A lot Affect,” about 26 AI engineers, founders, and thinkers whose “affect on the AI panorama far outstrips their fame.”
These embody individuals like Logan Graham of Anthropic, whose job is to try to push AI fashions to do terrifying issues like construct a bioweapon or enact a cyberattack; Beth Barnes, the founding father of METR, a nonprofit that exams AI fashions earlier than they’re launched; and Brandan Foddy of Mercor, which trains AI fashions to take over extra jobs and industries.
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The article, a collaboration with Transformer, a Substack e-newsletter in regards to the energy and politics of AI, features a footnote explaining that Denny used AI to generate portraits that had the appear and feel of VHS tapes. Certainly, every of Denny’s Technologists Portraits, because the sequence is named, reveals a smiling determine with a fake-seeming backdrop depicted within the sort of crackly, oversaturated palette related to “classic” media like VHS. The dated, distorted model of the portraits is a strong distinction to the the facility and affect held by this cohort of just about unknown AI specialists.
“With every main paradigm shift previously 20 years,” Denny defined, “I’ve tried to map and unpack a few of this group’s tales as they narrate our expertise of a altering technological world. The distortions of the ultimate compositions are traces of the adjustments which are coming and the individuals bringing them about.”
Denny has lengthy explored the intersection between artwork and know-how, and has these days been writing in regards to the matter as properly. (In April, he wrote in regards to the aesthetics of protection tech and in October about Polymarket, each for Artforum.) He represented New Zealand within the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, the place his present, “Secret Energy,” turned web servers into vitrines to show leaked paperwork and visible content material in regards to the Nationwide Safety Company and an intelligence alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand often called “5 Eyes.”
Extra not too long ago, Denny’s piece Output 0971 (2025), from his “Machine Portray” sequence, was included within the exhibition “Sentient Earth” at Amant. “I’m within the tales which are woven by the individuals making the know-how that we find yourself utilizing,” Denny informed ARTnews. “It’s laborious to parse what’s mythology and what’s fact once we’re confronting machine studying; it’s actually unfamiliar even to these actors who’re constructing it. That is why fable making is so vital within the tech house. How does all of this develop into acquainted and normalized?”
