STUDIO KEVIN ABOSCH: NOVEL ENCRYPTION (2015)

Kevin Abosch’s NOVEL ENCRYPTION are 6 GAN works created by Kevin Abosch in 2015 for the occasion of SIME Miami. Working with the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits as the starting point for a series of "novel encryptions" generated using a deep convolutional neural network (DCGAN) but stopping the training early, resulting in digits of varying decipherability. Each work presents a grid of four glyphs. Across the six works there are 24 glyphs which the artist uses as the foundation of a cipher alphabet.

“My father was in military intelligence and filled my mind with fantastic stories about cryptography. I use cryptographic glyphs as an entry point to a journey that travels well beyond the meaning of the underlying encrypted data. ” - Kevin ABOSCH

Technical notes: Each work is comprised of a grid of 4 outputs from the model. Each output was generated at 28x28 pixels creating a 56x56 pixels composite image which was further up-scaled to 256x256 pixels using “nearest neighbor” resizing. The color space of each work is sRGB and the file format is PNG. These works were created in 2015 and minted to the Ethereum blockchain in January 2025.