Algorithmic Art talk in London

Alex May took part in an Algorithmic Art event at Microsoft Office, Paddington on Wednesday 26 February 2025, joining two other artists to discuss different creative approaches to working with AI. The talk introduced ESSENCE, a new work that extends May’s Algorithmic Photography process through AI object recognition and image segmentation.

Rather than presenting AI as novelty, the event focused on artistic method. May used the talk to show how computational systems can be shaped with precision and restraint, and how machine vision can become part of a wider visual language concerned with selection, structure, and transformation.

The presentation sits clearly within May’s wider practice, where technology is used to think about memory, recording, and the unstable boundary between what is preserved and what is altered. In that context, ESSENCE extends earlier work on algorithmic image-making while opening a new line of enquiry into how automated systems classify, separate, and reconstruct the visible world.

Registration details were shared via the original Algorithmic Art Meetup page.