Tensors

2026 (ongoing)

Tensors is an ongoing series by Novak about what happens to an image before AI learns from it. Novak built a tool that performs that first hidden step. It turns a picture into a tensor, the grid of numbers a model trains on. Every image fed to an AI passes through this moment, and almost nobody sees it. Each work in the series runs a single image through the tool and shows the result: what the process keeps, and what it throws away. Novak uses Public Domain images, taken with consent, to perform the act usually done to artists without it. This is the first stage of the project, making the process visible. Later stages go further, into interrupting and poisoning that step, so an artist's work can't be quietly harvested and learned without permission. The aim throughout is protection, defending original work and the hand that made it.

The series began with Public Domain images from The Met.

Tensor 1 is made from Van Gogh’s self-portrait. He painted it in a mirror, “for want of a model” he couldn’t afford, looking at himself and setting a version down by hand. The work is already about remaking the self. Here it’s remade again, a century on, into numbers. The offcut holds what the process throws away: his brushwork, the marks a hand actually made.

Source: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler), 1887. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.