Frederik De Wilde: Deep Flaw

A pioneering milestone in AI-driven sculpture — the first sculptural 3D-printed readymade of the AI age.

Overview

Deep Flaw (2016) is a pioneering milestone in AI-driven sculpture — the first sculptural 3D-printed readymade of the AI age, extending Duchamp’s lineage from Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) into the algorithmic era.

Where Duchamp redefined art through the simple act of selecting an ordinary object, Deep Flaw extends and relocates this gesture into computation: selection becomes distributed across evolutionary algorithms, datasets, and machine perception.

Created by Frederik De Wilde in collaboration with researchers at the IT University of Copenhagen and the University of Wyoming, the project uses evolutionary computation and deep neural classifiers to generate three-dimensional forms from minimal, low-resolution photographic input. The resulting shapes are confidently labeled by machines as familiar categories, yet appear phallic, uncanny, or distorted to human viewers — revealing the hidden architectures through which machines “see.”

Deep Flaw stands as a 21st-century readymade: a digital sculpture in which authorship is shared between artist and algorithm, and where machine-driven and artist-in-the-loop selection becomes a sculptural gesture on par with Duchamp’s revolutionary interventions.

About Frederik De Wilde

Frederik De Wilde is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across art, science, technology, and design. His practice explores the inaudible, intangible, and invisible in digital and physical environments, critically engaging with the societal and ecological shifts driven by emerging technologies.

He is internationally known for his pioneering Blackest-Black nano-engineered artworks (2010), developed with Rice University and NASA, awarded the Ars Electronica Next Idea Award and the Best European Creative Cities Award, and influential to artists including Sir Anish Kapoor.

Continually pushing the boundaries of innovation, De Wilde has created works ranging from interspecies communication studies and generative data landscapes to quantum sculptures and Deep Flaw (2016), the world’s first AI- and evolutionary algorithm-generated 3D-printed artwork. His practice also includes neural network artworks and AI-encoded Dazzle camouflage systems.

His work is held in major collections including ZKM, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and the Foundation Prince Albert II of Monaco, and has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, BOZAR, MAAT, ArtScience Museum Singapore, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

De Wilde is a PhD researcher at Hasselt University / PXL-MAD and an alumnus of the Young Academy of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts (KVAB). He also serves on the advisory board of Simply Bread (USA/EU).