by David Young
GAN-based generative work
Fine Art Print
27.7” x 20” & 31.6” x 20”
Ed. 1/1 + 1 AP
Titles:
Life (b72b,m,3300,d-20,6,2,15,52,55-ca), 2020
Life (b72b,m,3300,d-20,6,2,15,53,17-ca), 2020
Life (b72d,m,2259,3+4,c-20,6,8,17,2,13-ca), 2020
The Life series is now complete and closed. Young will not generate any further works within this body of work. Each image is therefore a genuinely unique, singular work from a finite series.
Young's Life trains a Generative Adversarial Network on Conway's Game of Life as it runs - a cellular automaton in which elaborate behavior emerges from four simple rules. While his earlier Tabula Rasa and Learning Nature constrain the machine's data, here the constraint is conceptual: a modern learning system set to watch one of computing's oldest models of emergence, an ancestor of its own founding idea. The GAN generates images from what it observes, which Young then manipulates with his own code. What returns is not Life as we recognize it - the system renders the familiar as something strange, a reminder that these technologies perceive the world otherwise than we do.
Exhibited at EMERGENCE, Kate Vass Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland, 2026.
by David Young
GAN-based generative work
Fine Art Print
27.7” x 20” & 31.6” x 20”
Ed. 1/1 + 1 AP
Titles:
Life (b72b,m,3300,d-20,6,2,15,52,55-ca), 2020
Life (b72b,m,3300,d-20,6,2,15,53,17-ca), 2020
Life (b72d,m,2259,3+4,c-20,6,8,17,2,13-ca), 2020
The Life series is now complete and closed. Young will not generate any further works within this body of work. Each image is therefore a genuinely unique, singular work from a finite series.
Young's Life trains a Generative Adversarial Network on Conway's Game of Life as it runs - a cellular automaton in which elaborate behavior emerges from four simple rules. While his earlier Tabula Rasa and Learning Nature constrain the machine's data, here the constraint is conceptual: a modern learning system set to watch one of computing's oldest models of emergence, an ancestor of its own founding idea. The GAN generates images from what it observes, which Young then manipulates with his own code. What returns is not Life as we recognize it - the system renders the familiar as something strange, a reminder that these technologies perceive the world otherwise than we do.
Exhibited at EMERGENCE, Kate Vass Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland, 2026.
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