About

Bio

For more than three decades, Anne Spalter has used the computer to imagine future worlds. Trained in mathematics at Brown and in painting at RISD, she taught the first digital fine arts courses at both schools in the 1990s and wrote The Computer in the Visual Arts (1999). She is also a collector of and lecturer on early computer art. Her work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the RISD Museum.

Her current work with AI continues to use custom image pipelines alongside painting and drawing and augmented reality, building speculative landscapes of myth, cosmos and cities that combine her inner and outer experiences. Spalter searches for a technological sublime in which archetypal images are updated and re-imagined through machine vision systems trained on our collective visual memory.

Artist Statement

I have worked with computers as an artist since the early 1980s, long before most art institutions took the medium seriously. I studied mathematics and visual art at Brown and then received an MFA in painting from RISD. In the 1990s I began teaching digital fine arts at both schools, and in 1999 I published The Computer in the Visual Arts. My work was shown at the SIGGRAPH 1992 Art Show and in The Computer in the Studio (1994), co-organized by the DeCordova Museum and The Computer Museum. I also collect and lecture on early computer art, and I care about preserving its history.

My subject is the landscape as a place where the natural, the cosmic and the mythic meet, and where inner and outer experience merge. I make speculative worlds: deserts that dissolve into space, mythic animals, celestial events, and ordinary infrastructure like the New York subway carried into the future. I am drawn to the technological sublime, the awe and unease we feel when technology brings glimpses of new worlds.

Machine-learning systems are trained on huge archives of human images, so they act as a kind of collective visual memory, close to what Jung called the collective unconscious. I use them to see what that memory does to archetypes: the flight of Icarus, a gem, a spaceship, a train. For Future Trains (2025, with composer The Josh Craig), I built a custom Stable Diffusion video-to-video pipeline in ComfyUI, using AnimateDiff and ControlNet. I steered it with narrative prompts that change over time, then edited every sequence by hand to balance the grit of the footage against the machine's fantasy. In my experience, AI takes as much time and judgment as any other medium.

I maintain a traditional art practice alongside this work, including large-scale charcoal installations, pastels, tapestry, sculpture, and recently watercolor and pastel pieces created during a residency at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

CV

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Education

1992: M.F.A., Painting, with honors, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
1987: B.A., Mathematics, Visual Art (honors), and Independent Concentration (honors), Brown University, Providence, RI

Public Collections

Museums

Centre PompidouParis
Victoria and Albert MuseumLondon
Buffalo AKG Art MuseumBuffalo, NY
RISD MuseumProvidence, RI
Francisco Carolinum MuseumLinz, Austria
MAD Arts MuseumDania Beach, FL

Foundation and private collections

Thoma FoundationChicago
The Kramlich CollectionNapa, CA
Progressive Art CollectionMayfield Village, OH
Fondazione Aversano
Museum of Crypto Art
Flamingo DAO

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2023: Solo show, Expanded Art, Berlin, Germany
2021: In the Future Everything Will Be Perfect, solo installation, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, Boston, MA; Destination Unknown, Saint Kate Arts Hotel Gallery, Milwaukee, WI
2020: Vacation Planet, large-scale solo installation, Wallplay, Brooklyn, NY
2018: Cosmic Waves, University of Rhode Island Main Art Gallery, Kingston, RI

Selected Group Exhibitions

2026: Computer Worlds, Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai, China (Sept. 2026 – Feb. 2027); Collection Francisco Carolinum: 3 Blockchains, One Collection, Francisco Carolinum, Linz, Austria (Sept. 2026 – July 2027)
2025: Lit Encounters — theVERSEverse, collaborative work with Nathaniel Stern, MAD Arts Museum, Dania Beach, FL
2024: REIMAGINE TOMORROW: AI IN CONTEXT #2, AI Biennale Essen, Heilig Geist, Essen, Germany; curated by Anika Meier; Hello Brooklyn / Techspressionism 2024, Kingsboro Art Museum, Brooklyn, NY
2022: Peer to Peer, Buffalo AKG Art Museum with Feral File, Buffalo, NY; curated by Tina Rivers Ryan; Meta.space: Visions of Space, Francisco Carolinum, Linz, Austria; The Wonder of It All, Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, VT; Digital Visions, Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY
2021: Saint Somebody: Technologies of the Divine, Art Vault (Thoma Foundation Collection), Santa Fe, NM; AI in the Image: AI as Medium and Collaborator, National Humanities Center (virtual); curated by Ahmed Elgammal; Gala artist, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; curated by Tina Rivers Ryan
2020: In Kepler’s Gardens, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria
2019: From Digital to Dürer, Trenton City Museum, Trenton, NJ; curated by Judith K. Brodsky; Green: The Impossible Color, The Painting Center, New York; curated by Rachael Wren
2018: On&On: Arts Without End, Wheaton College, Norton, MA
2017: Virtual Views: Digital Art from the Thoma Foundation, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Off Time (City of Earthly Delights: Day), New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Brooklyn, NY
2016: Lumen Prize Global Exhibition Tour: Caerphilly Castle (Wales), Covent Garden (London), Leeds Digital Festival, Canary Wharf Winter Lights Festival; Kennard Park Sculpture Trail, Newton, MA, cross-media site-specific works

Public Commissions

2018–19: Turning Festival, Hong Kong harbor: 47,000 sq. ft. video projected on harbor buildings (Sino-Niio Merit Prize)
2017: IFP Week, Made in New York Media Center, Brooklyn: commissioned artist, 360° projection panorama and 27-screen video wall; Rainbow Room with AtmoSPHERES, commissioned Bridge Project, Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York
2016–17: NYC Dreaming, 52-channel video installation, Fulton Center, MTA Arts, New York

Awards and Residencies

2026: Essere Residency, Tuscany, Italy; Estudio Corazón at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, NM
2023: Lumen Prize, Long List, for The Bell Machine (2022)
2022: Mass MoCA / Assets for Artists residency (four weeks; also two weeks, 2019); Berlin Collectiv, two-week retreat, Gaucín, Spain
2019: Sino-Niio Merit Prize, Turning Festival, Hong Kong; Gazelli Digital Residency; Programa Venezia Contemporanea, Venice, Italy

Publications

2021: Author, “I’m an Artist. Should I Make an NFT?” CoinDesk
1999: Author, The Computer in the Visual Arts. Addison-Wesley

Work featured in

2025: Digital Art: 20 Pioneers Redefining Its Boundaries, Alessandra Mattanza, foreword by Serena Tabacchi. Schiffer Publishing (featured artist); On NFTs. TASCHEN (selected artist, writer, and collector)
2023: CryptoArt Begins. NFT Magazine (2022) / Rizzoli (2023), one of 50 featured artists
2021: Dismantling the Patriarchy, Bit by Bit: Art, Feminism, and Digital Technology, Judith Brodsky. Bloomsbury (discussed and quoted)

Selected Lectures and Panels

2024: “AI Art and Ethics,” NYU, Department of Technology, Culture & Society / Integrated Design & Media; Guest of Honor and Speaker, Generative Art Summit, Berlin; “AI as a Medium,” AI in Art lecture series, Castellani Art Museum, Buffalo, NY
2022: “How AI Is Changing Artistic Creation,” Columbia University Seminar in Society and Neuroscience; Lecturer, “Connoisseurship for Digital Art and NFTs,” Christie’s Education, New York; Keynote Speaker, Art NFT Linz, Francisco Carolinum, Linz, Austria; Computer Art Study Day, Smithsonian Archive of American Art, Washington, DC; Artist’s talks, University of Vermont; Grinnell College Museum of Art; Panelist, Sotheby’s Digital Art Forum at Diriyah Biennale, Saudi Arabia
2021: Lecturer, “From Net Art to Beeple: NFTs in Context,” Christie’s Education, New York; Lecturer, “Blockchain in the Art World,” Sotheby’s Institute of Art; “Digital Gold? What Artists Need to Know about NFTs,” RISD Alumni Association
2020: “Artificial Seascapes: A Conversation with AI Artists Anne Spalter and Sofia Crespo,” ISEA 2020

Selected Press

2025: Leonardo, review of The Generative Art Summit: From Camera to Artificial Intelligence 1954–2024, January
2024: Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, “Is This the Start of a New NFT Boom?” Artnet News, May
2023: Bruno Lus, “Les NFT sont morts, vive les NFT,” Vanity Fair France, January
2022: “Spring Break Art Show Asks, What Is the Ideal Naked Lunch?” Hyperallergic, September; Zachary Small, “Can an Art History Frame Help Expand the NFT Market?” The New York Times, April
2021: Judith Brodsky, “A History of Digital Art Through a Feminist Lens,” Hyperallergic, October; “How Women Artists Have Been Marginalized in the Blockchain Discourse,” Hyperallergic, June
2020: Goings On About Town, “Well, Now WTF?” The New Yorker, May; “Two Art Gallery Shows to Explore From Home,” The New York Times, May; “Collecting and Computing: A Conversation at the Armory Show,” Art in America, March
2019: “9 Leading Advisors Tell Us Which Artists Are Poised to Break Out in 2020,” Artnet News, December
2016: “Fulton Center video transforms NYC into a kaleidoscopic panorama,” Time Out, December; “Art museums heating up Miami’s cultural scene,” Financial Times, November; “Rites of Spring: Armory Arts Week,” Artforum, March