ARTISTS
Hugh McGrory celebrates the unreality of film, photography and AI as media made by humans rather than occurring naturally, as a copy of the natural. Embracing the artificiality of images allows him to explore the art, methods and techniques of the illusion. Hugh is a co-founder of Kinetek, an immersive media company based at MASS MoCA. He is currently in post production on Underscore, a feature-length art film that combines live actors with virtual production and AI. In 2003 Hugh co-founded Make, a film and generative animation studio, in collaboration with computer artist Glenn Marshall in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he directed and produced award-winning experimental short films. After a summer artist residency in microscopy imaging at Yale University in 2007, Hugh moved to New York City in 2008 where worked for over a decade curating audiovisual interactive installations during Art Basel and Volta Art Fair in New York, Miami and Switzerland. Highlights include screening work by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) in 2011 - 10 years before he sold an NFT at Christie's for $69 million, presenting interactive iPad art in Switzerland, and exhibiting robotic experiments by Alexander Reben (Open AI's first artist in residence) in 2013. In 2011, Hugh also brought the partners together for The Andy Warhol Film Digitization Project, featuring over 500 films by Warhol, developed in collaboration with The Moving Picture Company and Technicolor and described in the NY Times as “the largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in MoMA’s collection.” NFT Collection - “Images Aren’t Real” In Images Aren’t Real, Hugh McGrory draws no distinction between images made using a camera or generated with artificial intelligence; they are both artificial illusions. Still images are signifiers, AI images are imagined from data, moving images don’t really move - it’s all a sophisticated magic trick to fool our perception.
