NFT exchange between Sue Beyer and Brandon Gellis
Memoranda of Artificial Understanding is a collaborative-responsive project by Brandon Gellis and Sue Beyer that explores the unstable boundary between instruction, interpretation, and invention. Working with AI-enabled content generation, the project embraces both system and accident, using rule-based prompts, generated outputs, and hallucinated imagery to reveal how meaning emerges through misreading as much as through intention.
Rather than treating AI as a neutral tool, the project approaches it as a co-producing agent whose outputs are shaped by constraints, drift, and unexpected invention. The work is interested in what happens when artistic rules are precise but their results remain unpredictable, and when machine logic produces visual or textual forms that feel at once legible and estranged. In this sense, the project becomes a memo—not a fixed statement, but a record of human-machine exchange as it unfolds.
The project is a question about authorship, reliability, and the aesthetics of error. AI hallucination is not framed here as failure alone, but as a generative condition that exposes the instability of image-making and knowledge itself. By combining rule-based structure with responsive collaboration, Memoranda of Artificial Understanding proposes that artistic meaning can arise from partial control, recursive feedback, and the productive uncertainty of shared authorship.
Created for random_words_project
Title: Memoranda of Artificial Understanding, April 2022 (Wk.3) PNG 1888 × 1888px
Brandon Gellis
Instruction:
1. Generated five-random adjectives (sexual panicky glistening gleaning witty)
2. Used ink and Washi paper tape to create handmade-background image
3. Strategically add adjectives to background image
4. Save
collaboration #instruction #digitalart #randomwordproject2022 #suebeyer #brandongellis
Created for random_words_project
Title: Memoranda of Artificial Understanding, April 2022 (Wk.2)
PNG
1888 × 1888px
Brandon Gellis
Instruction:
1. Generated five-random verbs (control generate steal apply shoot) as inspiration for design
2. Used ink and Washi paper tape to create handmade image
3. Save
collaboration #instruction #digitalart #randomwordproject2022 #suebeyer #brandongellis
Title: Memoranda of Artificial Understanding, April 2022 (Wk.1), 1888 × 1888px
Brandon Gellis
Instruction:
1. Convert five-randomly generated nouns (office, gene, chest, physics, resources) into ASCII characters
2. Randomly place unscaled, abstracted image from recent work as background image
3.Rotate and scale ASCII characters as foreground image
4. Alter opacity of ASCII characters
5. Crop
6. Save
#collaboration #instruction #digitalart #randomwordproject2022 #suebeyer #brandongellis
Digital collage, digital prints, 2021
36” x 36” x 1”, 4 pieces
Collaboration between Brandon Gellis, USA, and Negin Ehtesabian, Iran
Saline Dreams is a four-part collaboration by two artists on two sides of the World: the U.S. and Iran. From across oceans, we have attempted to explore similar concerns over the depletion of marine, estuary, and freshwater habitats by human intervention. Aware of the catastrophic impacts of humans on the natural world, we are exploring questions of how industrialization, human dependency on technology, and a lack of governmental regulation led to the destruction of many vulnerable species and their habitats in both countries.
Negin Ehtesabian: https://www.neginete.com
Video stills, Axidraw robot line drawing, digital prints, 2021
“Subtle Drifts” is a six-part digital print series, featuring image stills generated through human interaction. Digital prints are stills from an interactive video series, Blend. The more viewers interact with Blend’s Web camera, the brighter the generated images appear. I have captured video stills documenting six-intervals in the live video feed. Images present organic subtle drifts in color values overlayed with generative, ink-line drawings.
