Atay Ilgun

The artist.

Realiti, a landmark digital artwork by London-based artist, curator, and researcher Atay Ilgun, is widely recognized as the first AI art collection minted on the Ethereum blockchain with a custom smart contract in May 2019. Regarded by historians and curators as a foundational moment in the evolution of AI, generative systems, and crypto-art, it utilises Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to explore themes of memory, perception, and mythology.

The upcoming auction marks the first-ever physical presentation of Realiti, featuring a museum-grade metallic C-Type print alongside the original NFT, complete with a holographic certificate of authenticity and embedded NFC chip.

Created during a period when few artists were exploring machine learning as a creative tool, Ilgun’s approach with Realiti was uniquely personal and poetic. Rather than presenting AI as a spectacle or adhering to the formalist tendencies common among its contemporaries, Realiti treated AI as an expressive tool, leveraging distinctive dataset curation and a DIY methodology, deploying emerging technologies with a deeply conceptual and curatorial frame, offering not just a glimpse into the aesthetics of the algorithm but an inquiry into authorship and simulation, making it a precursor to AI agents and autonomous artists. 

Since its rediscovery in 2021, it has garnered a dedicated collector base and has been featured in key archival records, highlighting its significant impact on the AI art market.

Atay Ilgun is a London-based artist, curator, and researcher whose multidisciplinary practice spans artificial intelligence, digital folklore, generative systems, and experimental sound. Positioned at the intersection of conceptual art, machine learning, and networked media, Ilgun’s work interrogates the aesthetics, psychologies, and power structures of emerging technologies.

His recent projects explore the mythologies encoded within digital consciousness and the shifting perceptual logics of a post-networked world. Blending AI, internet-native aesthetics, immersive theatre, underground club culture, and maximalist A/V performance, Ilgun constructs speculative environments where fragmented identities, synthetic memory, and algorithmic myth collide, charting a haunted, unstable terrain shaped by the architectures of code and culture alike.

Over the past decade, Ilgun has built an international profile through a range of curatorial, academic, and creative projects. He was Assistant Curator at IKLECTIK, one of London’s most active experimental arts spaces, and has exhibited or spoken at events such as Sonar+D, NFT London, and Swansea University. His collaborations span from academic institutions such as Sorbonne Université, City University London, and UAL, to artistic platforms including Most Dismal Swamp, Moth Quantum, and Café OTO. 

His 2023 album EUPHORIA was released on the experimental label Most Dismal Swamp, with a follow-up live album published by Café OTO. In 2025, he released RXALITI—a thematically adjacent body of work that continues his inquiry into the collapse of online reality and the spectral afterlives of AI systems. Constructed using an obsolete GAN framework, the project engages with concepts such as model decay, noise [vs. signal] as AI impasto, latent hallucination, and the “Dead Internet” theory, offering a vision of cyber-hauntology through the speculative gaze of a defunct AI agent/web-scraper.