Markos Kay first realized the worlds of art and science could intertwine when he saw a detailed illustration of the Big Bang in a copy of National Geographic in 1994. Now, 30 years later, he uses generative AI tools to visualize complex scientific concepts. He tells writer Joe Zadeh about the constant push and pull between his own vivid imagination and the AI models he employs, as he strives to make the unseen processes of the natural world visible.
Cast your eyes over one of Markos Kay’s most recent projects, “aBioGenesis” (2022), and you’ll see other eyes staring back at you. The images and animations portray a soupy and globular world where life has taken the form of bubble-, orb- and pearl-shaped flora and fauna. Pupils peer out from translucent vesicles that grow atop algae-like plants, and there’s a strong feeling that the creatures of this strange and colorful microcosm are as interested in observing you as you are them.
Born in Cyprus and based in the UK, Kay is a multidisciplinary artist and director who uses generative AI tools to create art that blends his own vivid imagination with the expansive power of machine intelligence. “My art is driven by a motivation to make accessible the phenomena behind the scenes of our reality as told through scientific narratives,” he tells me. “[It] strives to bridge the gap between complex scientific concepts and visual representation, allowing viewers to engage with and understand these unseen processes in an intuitive way.”
In “aBioGenesis,” he conceptually imagined the “lipid world;” one of the many scientific theories about how life first emerged, which postulates that it sprang forth from lipid forming membranes floating in a primordial soup. Other projects also stay grounded in science, but take surreal and magical turns; like in “Natural Portals,” where symbiotic life forms—a union of animal, plant, algae and fungi—reveal dilating orifices that open up like wormholes. It evokes a feeling that is akin, I imagine, to watching a David Attenborough show in ultra HD after a heroic dose of psilocybin.
Art has been a part of Kay’s life for as long as he can remember. He recalls poring over encyclopedias at a young age, and marveling at the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Van Eyck, Caravaggio and Velázquez. But a pivotal moment came in 1994, when he bought a copy of the National Geographic and saw a detailed scientific illustration of the Big Bang. “I still keep it to this day,” he says. “That was a key moment where I realized science and art could be brought together.”
Despite the organic aesthetic of his work, the presence of the machine always lurks nearby. “In generative art, an autonomous system—such as a machine, a computer program or a natural process—is used to create a piece of art,” Kay explains. “This involves setting the initial parameters and then allowing the autonomous system to generate the artwork. If you ever did spin art as a child, you’ve participated in generative art.”
Instead of pouring paint onto a spinning canvas, Kay feeds data into a range of generative AI models, neural networks and simulations. “Quantum Fluctuations,” for instance, was created using complex computer simulations that were fed with data provided by scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN, Geneva. The resulting artworks transport the viewer to the most fundamental aspect of reality, the quantum world, where quarks, leptons and bosons thrum and fluctuate in a ceaseless dance of energy.
Which elements of these artworks are Kay’s creativity and which are those of the machine? The line is intentionally blurred. His ideas travel through that mysterious and multidimensional latent space inside AI models, where human understanding is transmogrified into some other abstract, alien and yet wholly computable form of knowledge, and then back again. Sometimes he’ll prompt the AI model, edit the results it gives him, and feed them back in once more, creating abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions.
Kay says the act of prompting AI image generators has changed the way he thinks about language and words. “The way neural networks use language has made it clear to me that the meaning we assign to words is not as important as the connections drawn between them,” he says. “AI is able to make sense of language not through understanding the meaning of words but by finding patterns in the way they relate with each other. Meaning then becomes a kind of epiphenomenon, which ironically makes it lose all meaning or importance.”
Kay is now working on an immersive exhibition of visuals and animations, one that will tell a story that begins with the Big Bang and travels all the way to the rise of complex biological organisms, 30 years after he had his mind blown by that National Geographic illustration of the Big Bang. “I am finding myself in a full circle moment with this project,” he says.