Hardware && Hardware is a new collection of fifty unique works by Ivona Tau, presented by ICONIC. Bodies shaped through her own AI models carry the kind of microprocessors such models run on, each chip overlaid with actual source code from a GPT model.

For years, Tau has explored how machines interpret the human image, a question she calls the Machine Gaze. Hardware && Hardware is the culmination of her work on how machine learning renders the body, from UnBeautiful, which reclaimed female bodies from the idealized forms of popular AI models, to Body as a Machine. Here the gaze turns around: the model looks at the hardware it runs on. It is also her first work with transformers.

Tau does not use prompts. She trained a new model on close-ups from her black-and-white photographs, brought in the model from Family Album and an earlier GAN, and explored them with a tool she built, stopping each image before it turns realistic so the glitch stays visible. The microprocessor parts and the code on them are built in code, and the code is actual source code from a GPT model.

In programming, && is the logical AND: a statement that is true only when both sides are true. One hardware is the chip. The other is the body.

Each of the fifty works is unique (1/1), and each can be collected only once. Every work can also be collected as one 24 × 24 inch print.

Each work can also be collected as a 24 × 24 inch archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, with a metallic layer that carries the transformer code across the microprocessor parts. Up close, the code is legible. Each print is made to order, then individually hand signed and numbered by Ivona Tau, for an additional $250.