BrutAIsm

What generative AI loses, distorts and cannot reach when it meets art.

Artistic research and exhibition

Nicolae Grigorescu, Self-portrait, degraded by re-encoding 034 · bio

Nicolae Grigorescu, Self-portrait, 1868 · MNAR Collection

gen 000/100 · source · successive JPEG re-encoding

16.11–16.122026

  • National Museum of Art of Romania
  • National Gallery, 2nd floor
  • Opening: Monday 16 November, 6 pm
  • Open Wednesday–Friday 10–18, Saturday–Sunday 11–19

Self-portraits

You are what you eat.

Our generative model gobbled up 106 self-portraits from the collection of the National Museum of Art of Romania. Meet the 84 painters it ate: their lives, what history did to them and how they are tied to one another.

Enter the self-portrait gallery

The sheets are in Romanian for now.

Research

The Research Table

The texts from the Research Table, the fifth work in the exhibition: the manifesto and the experiments. In the room they are textile rolls you unroll on the table. Here you can read them in full.

  1. 00

    Manifesto

    This text is about an artistic medium that has not yet been born.Read
  2. 01

    Flowerless

    How to teach a machine to lie innocently    We tried to take the flowers out of an image-making model.Read
  3. 02

    Everybody, smile!

    What is left of a picture when you take the pain out    We tried to build a model that would not know the expressions of pain: crying, anger, fear, mourning.Read
  4. 03

    Autophagy

    What is left of Luchian when the model learns only from itself    An image model learned to imitate images by Ștefan Luchian, from 17 flower paintings in the MNAR collection.Read
  5. 04

    AI – Appearance Imitation

    Where the “AI look” of images comes from    The images of the first text-to-image generators, from 2022–2023, had a particular look: clean light, crisp outlines, porcelain skin, colours too rich.Read

Write to us

ContactInstagramFacebook

contact@brutaism.art