David Young
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David Young is an artist whose practice explores and questions our cultural obsession with technological innovation. Drawing on extensive experience with emerging technologies — from early AI in the 1980s to contemporary quantum computing — his work challenges the technological monoculture and our assumptions about the inevitability of "the new." Young combines open-source technologies with deep programming expertise to create works that meditate on innovation, beauty, and obsolescence.
A graduate of MIT's Media Lab (MS, Visual Studies) and UC Santa Cruz (BS, Computer Science), Young has taught at Art Center College of Design and Parsons School of Design. His work is held in collections including Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, and the GENAP Collection. Recent exhibitions include the 1st Shenzhen Art and Technology Biennale (2026) and Art Basel (2026). He lives and works in New York.
Featured Work
Further Reading
Selected Exhibitions
Tabula Rasa (b62g,5348), 2019
Fine Art Print, Ed. 1/1 + 1 AP, Dimensions: 40 x 40 cm
Tabula Rasa investigates the materiality and affective dimensions of artificial intelligence by stripping machine learning to its most elemental state. The work treats the neural network as a blank slate, training it exclusively on solid colors and basic geometric forms—the minimal visual vocabulary from which all complexity emerges. This radical constraint transforms the system into a site for exploring what might be called machine romanticism: the possibility that computational processes generate their own forms of expression when freed from the burden of representation.
The resulting images document the machine’s attempts to construct visual meaning from pure abstraction. Without photographic reference or semantic content to guide it, the system reveals its own material substrate—the computational grain through which all machine vision passes. These works suggest that what we interpret as machine “emotions” may be the visible traces of the system’s internal states as it navigates the space between input and output, between constraint and generation.
The images emerge from the tension between the machine’s mathematical structure and its generative potential, creating forms that exist nowhere else—neither in nature nor in human imagination, but in the specific topology of artificial neural networks learning to see.