David Young is an artist who has spent his entire career at the leading edge of emerging technologies. From projects using early supercomputers and the dawn of the web, to contemporary global innovation and artistic initiatives, David has been a champion for new forms of creativity and expression enabled by technology.

His current work with artificial intelligence asks if it is inevitable that only our largest organizations, with their vast data sets, will decide how we will use AI? Will AI simply reinforce and accelerate the inequalities and biases that already polarize society and threaten our planet? What if, instead, we could start small, to work at the scale of the personal, and engage directly with AI? Could doing so allow us to develop new intuitions and understandings of what the technology is, and what it could enable?

By using intentionally small data sets, often photos taken from the rural context of his farm in upstate New York, he trains the machine to build a limited understanding of the natural world. The work explores how aesthetic experiences can give a fresh start to how we think about artificial intelligence. And its scale highlights the irrationality of AI and its unique and unknowable materiality.

This work is a return to his roots where he began at the height of the 1980’s AI boom.

His work has been featured on magazine covers and in numerous exhibitions. He has taught at both Art Center College of Design and Parsons School of Design.

David has a master’s degree in visual studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from UCSC.

David is based in New York.