Jennifer and Kevin McCoy are no strangers to an American roadtrip. As West Coast natives living in Brooklyn, the artist couple are experienced cross-country drivers and clearly the capacious landscapes have made an impression.<\/p>\n
Each of the 310 collages comprising Land Sea and Sky<\/em><\/a>, the McCoys\u2019 first joint NFT collection which launched on April 6 (and is now sold out<\/a>), reads like a mesmeric memory of a transcontinental journey. It\u2019s all there\u2014the tawny Midwestern flats, the candy floss clouds, the cascading cliffs, the cheap roadside lodging, the snow-tipped mountains\u2014only these aren\u2019t sun-tinged Polaroids dug out of a shoebox and digitized, but the products of an A.I. art generator.<\/p>\n The works begin in collage with the McCoys marking out shapes and forms with edges that bear a roughness, as though torn out of a magazine. For guidance, the couple pored over the photographs of Ansel Adams, the godfather of American landscape photography, noting structures and patterns that appealed.<\/p>\n Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 06 Land 54Mountains 35 Sea 37Sky 28Trees<\/em>\u00a0(2023). Photo courtesy Artwrld and the artists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The McCoys used Stable Diffusion to generate hundreds of landscapes using prompts spanning all 50 states such as \u201cStormy seas off the Alabama coast\u201d or \u201cSkies above the desert near Las Vegas.\u201d They sorted these into one of five topographies: land, sea, sky, trees, and mountains, and then methodically filled in their cut-out landscapes. Last, they animated certain images using simple panning techniques, ones that visually echo the experience of looking out the car window on a long drive.<\/p>\n To look at one of their collages is to recognize an unrecognizable landscape, to see all of America and nowhere at all.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are turning our attention to the newest A.I. image generation tools,\u201d the McCoys told Artnet News. \u201cWe want to make a connection between the earlier aesthetic sensibilities and the new kind of image that is essentially a statistical image, an \u2018averaged\u2019 image created through mathematics.\u201d<\/p>\n Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, 83 Land 56 Mountains 30 Sea 26 Sky<\/em>, (2023). Photo courtesy Artwrld and the artists.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The McCoys are far from the first creatives<\/a> to merge the two buzziest recent phenomena in the art world\u2014A.I. generated images and NFTs\u2014but the timing and choice of Artwrld<\/a> as a platform evidence the thoughtfulness behind Land Sea and Sky<\/em>. Lest it be forgotten, Kevin McCoy is widely accredited with minting the first NFT, Quantum, <\/em>in 2014, which later sold for $1.47 million at Sotheby\u2019s in 2021, and the couple have spoken often about their faith in Web3 and cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n Despite such pedigree, the McCoys have been sparing with their NFT drops and have now chosen to do so on a platform devoted to collaborating with artists on thoughtful projects. Artwrld has only released five projects since launching in early 2022. Every project Artwrld project benefits a nonprofit of the artist\u2019s choosing, with the McCoys allocating 10 percent of primary sales and one percent of secondary says to Rhizome, an organization that promotes digital artists through commissions and scholarships.<\/p>\n Kevin McCoy, Quantum<\/i> (2014). Courtesy of Sotheby\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This mindfulness extends to the McCoys\u2019 approach to A.I.-generated images, which have caused considerable turbulence given their lack of oversight and the threat they pose<\/a> to working artists.<\/p>\n \u201cThe rapid advances made over the last few years [in A.I.] hint at the impacts these systems will have,\u201d the McCoys said. \u201cEngaging with an A.I. model to produce an output is a highly obscure process, even to the scientists who created the model.\u201d<\/p>\n In a playful conceptual flourish, the McCoys liken the opaque process by which a prompt typed into a generator creates an image to a wilderness. The goal, as the McCoys describe it, was to connect the wilderness of image-making in the 21st century to the physical one American artists of the preceding 200 years ventured into to paint and photograph.<\/p>\n The wildernesses they present are stunning and unsettling in equal measure.<\/p>\n![\"McCoys](\"https:\/\/news.artnet.com\/app\/news-upload\/2023\/04\/3-1-1024x1024.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Kevin](\"https:\/\/news.artnet.com\/app\/news-upload\/2018\/09\/Kevin-McCoy-Quantum-1024x1024.jpeg\")
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