Helena Sarin

Helena Sarin is a visual artist and software engineer who works under the name Neural Bricolage. She grew up in the Russian Far East, studied civil engineering in Moscow and worked in Israeli tech before Bell Labs hired her in 1996 to design commercial communication systems in the United States. She later worked as an independent consultant on computer vision software built with deep learning. Through those years she also took watercolor and pastel commissions and worked in fashion, food styling and photography.

Her art stayed analog until she found generative adversarial networks, which became her main medium. She trains models on small datasets of her own sketches, ink drawings, engravings and photographs, chains them together and finishes the results with Python scripts, a step she calls "numpytillism". Her GAN Weaver images arrange many model outputs into one large, high-resolution grid, and OM: Mediations of the GAN Artist rebuilds one of her charcoal and pastel paintings as a collage. Her generative jazz series includes Soul N' Blues, from Sax to Knife. She calls her approach "Folk AI Art": made with current technology, but carrying the folk-art values of beauty, humor and craft.

With Dmitri Cherniak she made gen2GAN, in which his generative code produces thousands of images that become the training data for her networks. Sotheby's sold two of its pieces in 2024, Red October and A Big Band, and All That Jazz. She has made several artist books, among them The Book of GANesis and GANcommedia Erudita, and since 2021 has turned her AI designs into ceramics under the tag #potteryGAN. Kate Vass Galerie in Zurich and Gazelli Art House in London are among the galleries that have shown her work.