Under the GAN
Craft proof: an immersive archive of early AI art, from the first machine dreams to autonomous creativity.
- Client
- Own product, for the Jediwolf collection
- Role
- Product ownerDesign
- Year
- 2026
- Discipline
- Product DesignWebAI / ML InterfacesPrototyping
A private collection of early AI art, 198 works by 61 artists from DeepDream in 2015 to autonomous systems in 2026, needed a home that could be two things at once: an immersive gallery worth entering, and an archive of record whose provenance, bios and curatorial framework hold up. Collection sites usually pick one. This one had to be walked, orbited and mapped, and still read like a catalogue.
An immersive archive of early AI art, from the first machine dreams to autonomous creativity: the decade machines learned to see, kept as a collection you can enter.
1. Ten ways of seeing the same 198 works: walk them in a museum, orbit them as a field or a globe, map them as a network, or read them as a grid, a timeline and an index. 2. A curator CMS underneath: roster-driven publishing, a dashboard of what needs attention, and a nightly on-chain sync that imports new tokens as pending and never auto-publishes. 3. Provenance as content: every work carries its Ethereum contract and token, the work page tells its chain history as a story, and the network view draws the collection wallet's graph.
Ten ways of seeing
The same works, encountered through different structures: as an archive, a museum, a timeline, a field, a network. Four of the views run on three.js; the rest are plain DOM, so the collection always renders.
The landing
A console boots the archive, the collection scatters behind the wordmark, and the page ends on the choice of how to see it.
A work, with its history
Each work page carries the piece, its model and facets, and a provenance story read from Ethereum: every hand it changed is written to the chain.
Artists and the editorial layer
Sixty-one artists with fact-checked bios, an About that tells the decade in four chapters, a field guide to the models, and exhibitions hung from the collection.
Summary
Live at underthegan.art since July 2026: a Vite, React and three.js front end over a Payload CMS on a single server, every route prerendered with its own metadata, analytics self-hosted, and an AI-assisted build throughout. Curatorial direction by Kate Vass; infrastructure by Novexing.
