Egor Kraft

Egor (George) Kraft
Егор Крафт
Born1986 (age 39–40)
Leningrad, USSR
Education
Occupationsartist, art-based researcher
Notable workContent Aware Studies
AwardsNew Technological Art Award (2022), Lumen Prize (2023)
Websitekraft.studio

Egor (George) Kraft (born 1986, in Leningrad) is an interdisciplinary artist and art-based researcher.

Biography

Egor Kraft was born in Leningrad, USSR, in 1986.[citation needed] His lifelong learning included numerous art schools in Europe and abroad: the Gerlesborg School of Fine Art (Sweden), Rodchenko School [ru] (Russia), Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria), Central Saint Martins (UK), Strelka Institute (Russia), and Tokyo University of the Arts (Japan). He participated in Strelka's The New Normal' postgraduate program and think tank, was a research fellow at the University of Southampton (through the EU's S+T+ARTS programme), and a lecturer at the Kunstuniversität Linz [de]. By the mid-2020s, Kraft lived a highly mobile life with studios in Vienna and Tokyo, but retained ties to London and Berlin.

Kraft's artistic practice is formed by technology, computer science, media, critical design, and philosophy, which fuel art-based research, speculative narratives, and artistic interventions. Kraft’s works address the modern world as the outcome of technological and social, informational and material, and econometric self-organizing and self-optimising dynamics. Kraft’s research-driven practice includes thought and physical objects, AI models, films, essays, hardware and software, artistic investigative enquires, hacktivist interventions, speculative proposals, and more. Kraft is often cited among the early wave of artists who works critically and conceptually with AI.

Artistic works

Over his artistic career, Kraft moved from physical objects to digital interventions and established a balance between the computational art and real-world objects. In the To Say It project (2008—), Kraft used large-format print media for a number of metatextual public space interventions. Within the series of artistic interventions Kickback (2015–2018), Kraft purchased blank tees from the fast fashion chains, added professional-grade printed statements mocking consumerism, and returning items to stores only to find them displayed on the most appealing spaces the day after. The project also ironized on the commercialization of actionist art, provocative by nature, but easily commodified (which is essentially the matter it often protests against).

The Link at the Art-Project exhibition in Saint Petersburg, 2016

The New Color (2011—) is an ongoing mystification that consists of a faux website www.thenewcolor.net, ads, and mockumentary interviews for a non-existent US chemical company that allegedly discovered a previously unknown color that can't be experienced through modern digital means. This carnivalesque trick eventually attracted lots of real people eager to receive samples of the new color or invest into the invention. Other post-Internet objects created by Kraft are the URL Stone and The Link (both 2015). The former is an ongoing experiment to study if ancient or contemporary medium better stands the test of time: a URL address carved on a marble plaque leads to the photo of the same plaque uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The latter is a feedback loop between the real exhibition space and its virtual counterpart created by a luminous hyperlink http://this-is-the.link/between/the/real-and-virtual which leads to a streamed 360° panorama of that location.

I Print Therefore, I Am project at Manifesta 10

The Printed Matter (2015) project consisted of a wide-format printer instructed to continuously manifest its existence on a looped sheet of paper by reproducing the line of text I print, therefore I am (a reference to the first principle of René Descartes' philosophy). The project was nominated for a 2019 Kandinsky Prize. The Air Kiss (2018) film was created as a part of his postgraduate studies in Strelka Institute to speculate about a possible 2050 Moscow where the governance was largely automated and handled over to an AI. The Chinese Ink (2018) installation used e-ink screens to stream real-time outputs of a computational model trained on images of inkblots splashed on watercolor paper and tasked to create algorithmically unique copies. The project was inspired by Chinese ink painting techniques and reflected on how traditions survive and change with technological advancements.

Following the 2022 Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Kraft presented several technical and tactical proposals addressing common wartime censorship, propaganda and misinformation tactics. Uncensored Architecture proposed the use of blockchain technology to distribute banned journalist archives over thousands of individual nodes. The Hashd0x | Proof of War project combined a highly programmable hardware camera compatible with telephoto optics, a mobile app, and a series of smart contracts to issue and automatically register tamper-proof digital watermarks, or as author titles them ‘hashmarks' for images or videos, which could provide a toolkit for professional and citizen journalists in documenting sensitive content, including war crimes. This project was awarded the 2023 Lumen Prize.

Content Aware Studies

Part of the Content Aware Studies project, 2018
Solo exhibition at alexander levy Gallery, Berlin, 2019

Artificial intelligence was Kraft's recurring topic since the mid-2010s. His long-lasting project Content Aware Studies (2018—) is a long-lasting project that employs various custom trained Ai models and technics as means to recreate lost parts of the historical artifacts, including Classical marble busts and reliefs, and paleontological documents of natural history.

The AI model was trained on thousands of 3D models of artifacts from the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum, National Roman Museum, and other museums, and tasked to fill the voids in the sculptures. Kraft printed the proposed elements in synthetic materials and combined them with the originals.

The outcomes of algorithmic generation were sometimes pertinent, but often eerie: the faithful authenticity was combined with bizarre errors, such as lack of facial features, extra heads, additional eyes on skull, or an extra mouth on the neck.

Kraft allowed his algorithmically faithful artificial contributor to generate possibilities unseen before rather than scientifically accurate authoritative pieces (the actually missing ones).

Publications

Exhibitions

The World According to AI exhibition space, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2025

Kraft's works were exhibited in major museums and art institutions, such as the State Hermitage museum (Innovation as an Artistic Technique, 2018), Saint Petersburg Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (Weather Forecast: Digital Cloudiness, 2018), ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Negative Space. Trajectories of Sculpture, 2019), MAXXI (Italy), Alexander S. Onassis Foundation (Greece), Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Spain), iMAL (Belgium), Jeu de Paume (The World According to AI, 2025), Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen (Cryptomania, 2023), MMOMA, MAMM, PERMM, Tretyakov Gallery, and the Polytechnic Museum.

He participated in biennials, festivals, and art shows, including Ars Electronica (Austria), Impakt Festival (Netherlands), WRO Biennale [pl] (Poland), Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (Russia), The 5th Ural Industrial Biennale (Russia), The European Fine Art Fair (Netherlands), Vienna Contemporary (Austria), Manifesta X (Russia), WRONG Biennale, Kyiv Biennale (Ukraine), Beijing International Art Biennale (China), Hong Kong International AI Art Festival.

Solo shows

Collections

Kraft's works are the part of institutional collections of Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Kuryokhin Center (Russia), Colección Solo (Spain), ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (Germany), Ripley's (USA), Cyland Video Archive (USA), and personal collections.

Awards

The New Technological Art Award, group exhibition, Zebrastraat, Ghent, 2021

In 2017, he was included in the New East 100, a list of people and projects shaping the world today by Calvert Journal. In 2020, The Art Newspaper listed him among the most prominent artists of Russian origin.

Kraft was the finalist of the 2021 Re:Humanism Art Prize (Italy), the 2022 Austrian Blockchain Award and the Jury Award at the New Technological Art Award (Belgium), the 2023 Lumen Prize (UK), the 2024 Falling Walls Science Summit Award (Germany). He was awarded the 2019 Garage Arts and Technology grant, S+T+ARTS residency and a S+T+ARTS Prize honorary mention (EU). Previously, he was shortlisted for the Kandinsky Prize and Innovation Prize, the Sergey Kuryokhin Contemporary Art Award (Young Artist of the Year), the Creative Enterprise Award by the University of the Arts London, and Pulsar The Open Art Prize.

References

  1. ↑ Markus Jandl, Gerfried Stocker (2023). Prix Ars Electronica 2023. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. p. 228. ISBN 9783775756037.
  2. ↑ Johanna Hofleitner (October 20, 2023). "Die Mystik der Verschlüsselung". Kultur Magazin: 15. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "Egor Kraft". Art Center Ongoing. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Egor Kraft". Alexander Levy. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 "Egor Kraft". SOLO. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  6. ↑ "About & CV". Studio E. Kraft. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  7. ↑ "Egor Kraft". New East Digital Archive. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  8. 1 2 "Hashd0x / Proof of War". S+T+ARTS. 2023. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  9. 1 2 "Artist Egor Kraft's guest seminar on AI and speculative narratives". University of Southampton. February 18, 2020. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  10. ↑ Alexandra Orlova, Elvira Zhagun-Linnik. "Post-Internet Art in Russia as a Digital Folder in the World Practice" (PDF). Proceedings of EVA London 2022 (EVA 2022). doi:10.14236/ewic/EVA2022.16.
  11. ↑ "Egor Kraft — New East 100". New East Digital Archive. October 22, 2017. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  12. ↑ "About & CV". Studio E. G. Kraft. Retrieved October 28, 2026.
  13. ↑ Jelena Novaković, Jelena Guga. "Art after AI: The Impact of Generative AI on the Artworld". Navigating the digital age. Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. pp. 584–604. ISBN 978-86-82324-85-0. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  14. ↑ "To Say It". W-O-S. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  15. ↑ "Sagt es allen: to say it". Loslegen: 12–13. 2012.
  16. 1 2 3 4 5 Ellen Sarkisian Åkerman (2021). "Konst i ruinerna av en utopi: en analys av nominerade bidrag till Kandinsky- och Innovatsijapriserna 2019/2020". Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  17. ↑ "Kickback, 2015—2018". Denis Himilajne Collection. Retrieved September 2, 2024.
  18. ↑ Sergey Gulenkin (June 28, 2016). "Future present: ten rising stars at the Moscow Young Art Biennale". New East Digital Archive. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  19. ↑ Dominique Moulon (September 22, 2018). "The Ars Electronica festival / Written in the stone". Art in the Digital Age. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  20. ↑ "Egor Kraft for .ART at Ars Electronica'18". Art. September 7, 2018. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  21. ↑ "Air Kiss". Kurzfilmfestival Köln. Retrieved September 2, 2026.
  22. 1 2 "Re: define the boundaries; Re:humanism #2". Daniela Cotimbo. Retrieved September 2, 2026.
  23. ↑ Daniela Cotimbo (July 9, 2021). "AI as Experience of the Limit". Nero. Retrieved September 2, 2026.
  24. ↑ Daniela Cotimbo (2022). Re: Humanism. RE: DEFINE THE BOUNDARIES. Kappabit Edizioni. ISBN 979-12-80058-09-6.
  25. ↑ "Proof of War". Lumen Prize. Retrieved September 2, 2026.
  26. ↑ Duncan Ballantyne-Way (June 3, 2022). "Lies, Half-Truths & Propaganda: Egor Kraft's anti-disinformation machines". The Berliner. Retrieved September 2, 2026.
  27. 1 2 "2023 Winners". Lumen Prize. Retrieved September 3, 2026.
  28. ↑ Lucas Lixinski, Lucie K. Morisset, ed. (2024). The Routledge Handbook of Heritage and the Law. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781003852261.
  29. ↑ "アートは科学とテクノロジーに何をもたらすのか？　EUが取り組む「S+T+ARTS（Science, Technology & the ARTS）」". 美術手帖. January 29, 2023. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  30. ↑ "CAS XXVI Latent Scull Simulation". E.G. Kraft. 2024. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  31. ↑ Ennio Bianco (July 24, 2019). "Il senso estetico dell'Intelligenza Artificiale". Espoarte. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  32. ↑ J. Emil Sennewald (May 5, 2025). "Wo KI-Kunst 2025 wirklich steht". Kunstmagazin Parnass. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  33. ↑ Maya Jaggi (January 2023). "The artist in the science lab". Le Monde Diplomatique. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  34. ↑ Songwei Ge, Austin Dill, Eunsu Kang, Chun-Liang Li, Lingyao Zhang, Manzil Zaheer, Barnabas Poczos (August 20, 2019). "Developing Creative AI to Generate Sculptural Objects". Proceedings of International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2019).{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  35. ↑ Vuk Ćosić; Régine Debatty; Vladan Joler (2022). E-Relevance. The Role of Arts and Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Council of Europe. p. 240. ISBN 9789287191496.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  36. ↑ Andreas J. Hirsch, Gerfried Stocker, Markus Jandl (2022). The Practice of Art and AI. Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co. ISBN 9783775751421.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  37. ↑ Xavier Ess (November 20, 2023). "Êtes-vous normal ? pas très normal ? tout à fait normal ? Réponse dans l'expo Code & Algorithms chez iMAL". RTBF. Retrieved September 7, 2026.
  38. ↑ After Agency. Resistance. Adaptation. Speculation. Adam Mickiewicz University. 2021.
  39. ↑ Martin Skrodzki (December 17, 2019). "AI and Arts – A Workshop to Unify Arts and Science". w/k. Retrieved September 7, 2026.
  40. ↑ Hallie Meredith, Sarah Barnett (December 9, 2021). "'Contemporary Classicism' Copy of a Copy: Appropriating Classical Statues as Conceptual Readymades". CLARA: Classical Art and Archeology (2). doi:10.5617/clara.9250.
  41. ↑ Nadim Samman (2023). Poetics of Encryption. Art and the Technocene. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin. p. 128. ISBN 9783775752657.
  42. ↑ Manual Padin Fernandez. "Reseña_UNA IDEA DE SIMPATÍA: MAGIA, FE Y NUEVAS TECNOLOGÍAS" (PDF). Accesos. Retrieved September 6, 2026.
  43. ↑ Pedro Telles da Silveira. "Copy, Object & Matter in 3D Printed Copy, Object & Matter in 3D Printed Historical Monuments Historical Monuments". &&& Journal. Retrieved September 6, 2026.
  44. ↑ "Egor Kraft: Content Aware Studies". Nadim Samman. 2019. Retrieved September 6, 2026.
  45. ↑ Dejan Grba. "Deep Else: A Critical Framework for AI Art". Digital (2(1)).
  46. 1 2 New Technological Art Award. Liedts‑Meesen Foundation / Zebrastraat. 2022. pp. 54–55.
  47. ↑ Nicolas Sarazin (June 12, 2025). "Stunned by. Interview with Antonio Somaini, curator of the exhibition "The World According to AI"". Art Majeur. Retrieved September 5, 2026.
  48. ↑ Eana Kim (April 7, 2025). "Jeu de Paume puts on wide-ranging survey of work created by artists working with artificial intelligence". The Art Newspaper. Retrieved September 5, 2026.
  49. ↑ "10th Beijing International Art Biennale: Coexistence". Artinformado. Retrieved September 4, 2026.
  50. ↑ "Hong Kong AI Art Festival". The Beat. 2025. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  51. ↑ "Egor Kraft". GUM-RED-LINE. Retrieved January 27, 2024.
  52. ↑ Основной проект: УОМЗ. Ural Biennale. p. 146.
  53. ↑ Mihhail Kolossok. "Uus vene kultuur Eestis: Egor Kraft (video)". Retrieved September 2, 2026.
  54. ↑ "Egor Kraft". Kandinsky Prize. Retrieved September 2, 2026.
  55. ↑ Stine Gustafsson. "Dealing with the idea of censorship-proof archiving". Alexander Levy. Retrieved September 1, 2026.
  56. ↑ "Deep Portrait Studies Vertical". Google Arts & Culture. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  57. ↑ "He aprendido que tienes que rezar por lo que no conoces". Salaamos Salvador. March 3, 2022. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  58. 1 2 "Egor Kraft". Denis Khimilyayne's Collection. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  59. ↑ "Egor Kraft". ONASSIS. Retrieved August 31, 2026.
  60. ↑ Konstantin Agunovich, Milena Orlova (September 30, 2020). "Top 50 most promising Russian artists". The Art Newspaper Russia.