Robbie Barrat

Robbie Barrat is an artist from West Virginia who taught himself to build neural networks as a teenager. A program he wrote to rap in the style of Kanye West led to an internship at Nvidia, and in 2018 he moved to a bioinformatics lab at Stanford. That year he trained generative adversarial networks (GANs) on thousands of landscape and nude portrait paintings. The landscapes came out convincing. The nudes turned into what he called "awful blobs of flesh", and that failure became the point of the work. He shared his code online, and a Paris collective later used it for a portrait that sold at Christie's.

In July 2018, 300 frames of his AI Generated Nude Portrait #7 were given to guests at Christie's first Tech Summit in London, each on a card that could be redeemed for its token. Years later only a dozen had been claimed, and the rest became known as the Lost Robbies. In 2022 Sotheby's sold one of the cards, Frame #64, in its Now Evening Auction in London.

In 2019 he and the French painter Ronan Barrot showed BARRAT/BARROT: Infinite Skulls at L'Avant Galerie Vossen in Paris. A GAN learned from hundreds of Barrot's small skull paintings, and Barrot answered its output with corrections and new skulls. The two worked together again in 2024. Barrat also trained a network on Balenciaga runway images, and Acne Studios used his networks for its AW20 menswear collection. He moved to Nantes, France, and later studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. His recent work includes generative landscapes printed on plexiglass, paintings and character studies about Counter-Strike, and a reworked version of the 2000 arcade game Big Buck Hunter. L'Avant Galerie Vossen represents him.