David Young

David Young has spent his entire career at the leading edge of emerging media and technologies. Almost almost thirty years of doing client-based design innovation he shifted to generative and AI-based art . 
His work explores how beauty and aesthetic experiences can give a fresh start to how we think about new technologies. Currently he is using AI and machine learning, a return to his roots where he began his career in the height of AI boom in the 1980s. 
The work asks, is it inevitable that only our largest organizations, with their vast data sets, will decide how we will use AI? What if, instead, we could start small, to work at the scale of the personal, and to engage directly with AI. And could doing so allow us to develop new intuitions and understandings of what the technology is, and what it could enable? 
The work exists in the rural context of upstate New York and the domain of nature. This was chosen, not only to emphasize its difference from mainstream AI, but to place it in the area’s rich creative history. Almost two hundred years ago the Hudson River School used painting to express man’s relationship to nature. What would it mean for an AI today to understand/interpret that same nature? 
David has a masters degree in visual studies from the MIT Media Lab, and a bachelors degree in computer science from UCSC.