Welcome
Guli Silberstein is London-based digital/AI video artist & researcher. For more than two decades, he is continuously engaged in digital art, since graduating with a Master’s degree in Media Studies from The New School New York in 2001. Specialising in VFX, ‘glitch’ art, and AI, he dedicatedly explores how ideas can be translated to moving forms, by intersecting technology, media and cognition, within the human context.
His extensive body of work has been consistently showcased and won awards at festivals and exhibitions around the world, such as the WRO Media Art Biennale in Poland, Transmediale Festival in Berlin, FILE in São Paulo and many others, He has been a speaker and a guest in many art and research events, presenting his work.
Video artworks have also been chosen & curated by Sedition Art, LUMAS Galleries, Artpoint Paris, Makersplace, and Luba Elliott's AI gallery selection. He has worked in the corporate world too, providing post-production work to Sky, BBC & CNN, and has been doing commissions too, to a variety of collaborators. His original video content, shared regularly on social media, has gained a community of 250k followers, and accumulated more than 150 million views.
"In Silberstein’s works, the image error or glitch is always representative, a phantasmagoric presence of sorts, evoking the spiritual, the political, the intimate, the human"
(José Sarmiento-Hinojosa, Found Footage Magazine #6, March 2020)
"Guli Silberstein’s excellent Cut Out...a film about the way media can liberate and protect people in dangerous situations"
(The Scotsman, 18th Apr 2016)
"Within Silberstein's creative work, both prediction and chance play a key role. The impression (digital and emotional) that emanates from each layer of data easily lends itself to gripping reading"
(CINEMASINFIN, a blog by Borja Castillejo Calvo, 2021)
His art work progress can be roughly divided to three stages: 2000-2014 - socio-political pieces processing personal recordings, found footage, and mixes of both, to produce new perspectives on issues of war, and perception, from 2015 - using 'glitch' a technique to break down the image, deconstructing video code, investigating formations of the body and finding new landscapes in personal and media footage. And since 2020 working intensely with AI - creating short video loops and experimental feature films, exploring and subverting open-source AI platforms to push boundaries and generate unexpected forms of humans and environment.
Over the years, the art work has been winning awards and shown in many festivals and venues, including: WRO Media Art Biennale Poland, Transmediale festival Berlin, Jihlava International Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts USA, French Cinematheque Paris online channel, FILE – Electronic Language International Festival Brazil, the Royal Scottish Academy Edinburgh and numerous more. A curated artist at Sedition Art London alongside Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Yoko Ono, a member at the NFT platforms Foundation and MakersPlace, and a curated AI artist by creative AI researcher Luba Elliott, in her Computer Vision Art Gallery.
Inspired by dreams, nightmares, visions, hallucinations and memories, his works experiment with video form as poetic expression, and tell visual stories, developing thematic inquiries regarding body, environment and perception. It’s a continuous practical research, a life project, tracking down peculiar usages of computer processes, to produce moving image assemblies that form new aesthetics fed by inner personal experiences.
Artist Statement:
I’m an artist and filmmaker working with digital video since 2001. My practice involves the digital manipulation of video to explore themes of the human condition, perception, and the impact of technology on society. I aim to create tangible, moving textures that activate the imagination and inspire heightened awareness.
My artistic journey began with processing personal recordings and found footage as a commentary on global events, focusing on individuals caught in war situations, alongside explorations of the human psyche. I later adopted glitch techniques to disrupt images, uncover new meanings, and create unique visual forms. Recently, I have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into my work, using algorithms to predict and generate visual forms in aesthetics, scale, and volume previously unseen.
Experimentation and research drive my approach. Using digital tools, I generate, dissect, and reassemble video to challenge viewers' perceptions, aiming to provoke thought, discussion, and action. I share my findings through publications, conferences, interviews, screenings, and exhibitions, reaching a broad public community via social media and active engagement with the artistic community.
Philosophically, my use of AI raises questions about predictions and the implications of neural networks in our lives, considering big datasets holding massive mounts of cultural history. I'm curious about the new findings that can be discovered using AI, in the form of new audio-visual moving images. Those new forms are suggesting that AI’s 'brain' can offer insights into human cognition beyond what was possible until now. Socially and politically, by reworking media footage, my art reflects on how information is presented and consumed in the digital age, highlighting distortions often hidden in plain sight, in order to understand, inspire and expand human perception.