Boris Elgadsen, the man who was awarded first place for an AI image at the Sony World Photography Awards last year, is selling The Electrician for $21,500 (€20,000).
The German artist’s controversial picture is on sale at the Palmer Gallery in London as part of an exhibit entitled Post-Photography: The Uncanny Valley which contains other AI image prints that are also available to purchase, although none come close to the hefty price tag of Elgadsen’s.
$20,000 is still far below the most expensive piece of AI-generated art ever sold: in 2018, an AI art piece went for over $400,000 which was marketed as the first ever art created by an algorithm.
Elgadsen will be exhibited alongside artists Nouf Aljowaysir and Ben Millar Cole in a series that looks to blend photography with synthetic art. EuroNews reports that Aljowaysir’s work focuses on her Saudi Arabian lineage and the stereotypes of the Arab world contained within machine algorithms.
Meanwhile, Millar Cole’s work plays on known AI artifacts — like too many fingers — by producing otherworldly shapes and figures.
“The artists in the exhibition engage with the current possibilities of creative collaboration with AI tools, harnessing the unique affordances brought on by the various technologies, whilst thinking about their implications,” AI-art curator Luba Elliott tells EuroNews.
“Image recognition tools highlight the imperfection of the machine gaze, whereas photorealistic text-to-image models focus on portraying our collective imagination down to the smallest detail, with the prompt engineer at the steering wheel – taking the viewer to the next stage of art history.”
Boris Elgadsen’s AI Antics
Shortly after Elgadsen was awarded first place in the Creative category of the 2023 Sony World Photography Open competition, he revealed to the world that it was AI-generated — reveling in the fact he had fooled the judges — before refusing the prize.
The photo is part of a series titled Pseudomesia: Fake Memories that Eldagsen has been working on since 2022.
“I am very happy that I won the Creative category of Sony World Photography Awards 2023 / Open Competition / Single Image,” he wrote at the time. “I have been photographing since 1989, been a photomedia artist since 2000. After two decades of photography, my artistic focus has shifted to exploring the creative possibilities of AI generators.”
Image credits: Boris Elgadsen.
