Aykan Umut (°1975, Gent - Belgium)
Visual artist Aykan Umut, originally trained as a craft animation artist and grew into an established digital production and artwork creator, developed as modern creative a strong vision in image making through the years. The past decade has lent his creative touch to numerous street culture and music infused brands and collaborators e.g. Glenfiddich, Moncler Genius and Swizz beatz.
The recent technological innovations – with artificial intelligence and the concept of tokenising in particular – opened up new possibilities for the artist and challenged him to level up his autonomous artistic practice. These new tech-based tools let him create new forms and visual concept which already playing in the artist's head for a long time. Not only did music and street culture influenced his early, often commissioned based, works.
These influences play an even more important role in his current autonomous work. As a “prompt” curator of his own mind, the artist uses Ai-tools as an executive assistant for his current ongoing series. Images, to complex to stage in the physical world, now finally are able to bring to life using this new range of generative open-source tools. Just like in the real world the process is all about trail-and-error, testing, creating, re-creating and finetuning the artistic concept which translate into well crafted aesthetically pleasing pieces As an artistic storyteller – engaged and passionate by Ai-technology – Aykan creates his personal mixed-reality narratives.
Characters which are marked by their penetrating gaze invite the audience in almost hypnotic ways – to engage with the artwork into this new fictional world, let time stand still and forget reality for a moment.