Timur Nugmanov

My introduction to art started at an early age. I have vivid memories of my parents taking me to museums, which had a profound impact on me. As a teenager, I began to take a more serious interest in art. I started reading a lot and studying art theory! I'm still at it today!

I think the term artist has become somewhat overused. I'm a photographer in one lane, and a "non-artist" in another. What about you? How do you describe yourself?

What I mean is, to find art, you need to lose it first. The role of a "non-artist" is someone who has lost art and is in search of it — that search is the process through which art is created.

There are many, of course! A few favorites include: Thomas Demand for the form and memory I can't recall, Jeff Wall for the movie scenes that never existed, but he saw them, Wolfgang Tillmans for the unconscious where my emotions reside.

I find inspiration everywhere. For instance, in music, since I trained as a musician myself, in reading various theories about art, philosophy, and scientific literature. When it comes to artists, Francis Bacon, Tony Matelli, and Pamela Rosenkranz are my go-tos, though there are many others, these are just the first that come to mind.

The issue with digital is that it's intangible, and the whole point is making it so. The tool of AI itself is also complex. It's a very fine line between good and bad.

Exactly — sound adds that tangible feeling. You can physically understand sound, and if you remove the audio from my works, they lose a lot. The soundscape of the real world intersects with the visual AI, creating a shift in how we perceive the real and the generated. That connection moment creates something like sound reflections from one pixel to another, crafting the landscape that makes the generated feel more real. AI is like a blind photographer, director, cinematographer... The soundscape focuses on the visual part and fills the scene to clearly mark what has never been seen before.

Of course, there could be so many answers, but my take on it is that AI, in a way, outputs invisible "emotions", a kind of pure thought in which everything visually coexists. And it's precisely the quality of this thought that I see. And I don't want to talk about the conceptual idea, like Joseph Kosuth with his chairs, the real chair, the photographic chair, and the chair as described in words, though a connection can certainly be traced. We no longer need the real chair (figuratively), leaving us with the photographic and the described versions. The photographic chair is saturated with its various sets. But the chair described in words becomes infinite, and it is precisely the thought that AI shapes. Thought is the pure form of AI art. Ultimately, what distinguishes good from bad is our subjective view of this thought-visual form and how well the initial selection was made, which is already a premise for determining its quality.

I don't think it's an easy process where you just write a prompt and it's done. Many artists who have started using artificial intelligence come with years of practice and observations, and primarily, it's a tool! But this tool also allows those without such vision to create something, to showcase their thoughts!

I was involved in conceptual photography, then moved on to scanography, and from there to AI.

First and foremost, I was amazed that words, as one of the primary forms of object designation, could be read by artificial intelligence, and it produces some results. For me, it's like digging into my own memory searching for various recollections. It's like looking for a trigger that will make everything come back and show it to me. The creative process hasn't changed much; it just became a bit different. I've always been in search of the new, and AI made this search easier for me than usual.

You give it yourself, your view of the world, your sensations, and your universe, how you feel about your surroundings. The human aspect has never been so accessible until AI. A point created by AI moving in space and casting its nets with the emergence of the new, like the explosion of the Universe on the first day, from the end...

The volume of information is so vast that there was a need for something that could process it all, and consequently, we have artificial intelligence. To fight for survival, we don't need any artificial intelligence :) There's always a chance :)