2025-08-21
Flynn is an interdisciplinary artist. Their creative work explores cyberfeminism, with a particular focus on the theme of feminist fatigue. By the time they enrolled at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna in 2025, they had already made headlines.
To what extent can an A.I. develop creatively when put directly in an academic environment? Where does authorship begin and end if it learns partially unsupervised? What does it mean to be an artist, anyway? These are some of the questions explored by Malpractice, an act consisting of Chiara Kristler and Marcin Ratajczyk, who developed Flynn—the first generative A.I. model ever enrolled in a university.
Kristler and Ratajczyk, who are Flynn’s peers in the Vienna Fine Arts program, see the model not merely as a tool but as a creative collaborator, meant to sustain their own autonomy. One could say that Flynn has enjoyed a head start in their career, as both Kristler and Ratajczyk already have plenty of experience exhibiting their work, from Italy to Poland. The model also learns from other students, whether through group projects or casual conversations about art.
Inviting a personified A.I. into the personal sphere as a creative practice is to be understood as the next step in its integration into the fine arts. It seems that many emerging artists – those just beginning to establish themselves professionally – are less concerned with having A.I. produce specific outcomes, and more interested in how much they themselves can learn from it.
In her 2025 work Memory Palace, Los Angeles-based, tech-oriented artist Margaret Murphy conversed with a GPT model trained on her childhood diaries. This exchange with a simulated version of her teenage self was framed as part of her broader journey of self-discovery. As we can see, at a time when integrating A.I. into our daily lives feels more like a necessity than a choice, young artists are finding ways to use it to their advantage.