Hardware && Hardware
by Ivona Tau
ICONIC Art Pass Pre-Sale · November 9
Public Sale · November 11
Both open at 12 PM ET
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“A model can never know what it runs on.”
HARDWARE && HARDWARE
The body and the machine, both true at once.
For years, Ivona Tau has trained machines to look at us: our photographs, our memories, our bodies. In Hardware && Hardware, fifty unique works, she turns that gaze inward. The machine is no longer only looking. It is in the picture. Bodies shaped by her own AI models carry the microprocessors that models like these run on, and each chip is overlaid with source code from a GPT model.
The title is written in machine syntax. In programming, && is the logical AND: it returns true only when the conditions on both sides are true. One hardware is the computer. The other is the body. Tau’s framing, the body as hardware and the mind as software, reaches back to La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine (1747), and uses that old idea as a reminder of two things: that AI is calculation running on chips, not a mind, and that our own bodies are remarkable machines.
The collection brings together a line of work on how machine learning renders the body. It began with UnBeautiful, which reclaimed female bodies from the idealized forms of popular AI models, and continued with Body as a Machine, shown at ViVi Gallery in Hangzhou and PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai. Here the machine takes hold of the body most directly. By Tau's own account, the collection also took her most layered process to date, a pipeline with more stages than any she had built before.
There are no prompts. Tau trains her own models on small, curated datasets drawn from her black-and-white photographs and her family archive, explores them with a tool she built, and stops each image before it turns realistic, so the glitch stays visible as the mark of the medium. The chips arrive as collage, a gesture she takes from Linder’s Pretty Girls (1977), where household appliances covered bodies cut from magazines. In Tau’s hands, the appliance becomes the microprocessor.
Presented by ICONIC, Hardware && Hardware arrives as the industry describes AI as weightless, something that lives in the cloud. The work puts the machinery back into the image, and the body back into view.
Kinship and Intrusion
Across the fifty works, the chips sometimes line up and feel like part of the body, and sometimes read as alien intruders. Tau suggests choosing a work by where it sits between those two poles: each is a final destination of the same in-between, reached by a different route.
Left: #17, kinship · Right: #11, intrusion · Drag to move between them.
ABOUT
Ivona Tau
Ivona Tau (b. 1990, Lithuania) works across photography, moving image and installation, and her main material is the photographic archive. She trains her own generative models on images she has made or gathered herself, from analog and Lomographic film to family archives.
Tau holds a doctorate in artificial intelligence from the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, with research in computer vision, and a master's degree in mathematics.
Her work has been presented by institutions, galleries and auction houses including Onassis ONX in Athens, the Herbert W. Franke Foundation in Wolfsburg, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Ars Electronica Garden New York, bitforms gallery and Venus Over Manhattan in New York, Unit London, HOFA, Kate Vass Galerie, Art Basel Miami, Christie's and Sotheby's. Solo and two-person exhibitions include ViVi Gallery, Hangzhou (2026), Galerie Met, Berlin (2025, with Anna Fraire) and Tech Contemporary, Copenhagen (2024). In the digital art field she has worked closely with Fellowship, Verse, AOTM Gallery, Bright Moments in Berlin, Tokyo and Venice, and Braindrops.
Tau was named an Onassis ONX Fellow in 2026 and won the Speculative Agency Award of the 4th CIFRA Award in Berlin in 2025. She has been a finalist for the Lumen Prize (2025), the ABS Digital Art Prize (2025), and the Digital Art Awards presented by HOFA with Phillips in London (2025) and Hong Kong (2026). Her work is held in the collections of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Francisco Carolinum Linz.
The Journey
From the camera to the chip
Tau's work has always started with photography and asked what a machine does with it. Over a decade, the Machine Gaze has moved from reinterpreting memories to examining how AI models render the human body.
Hardware && Hardware turns that gaze around: the model looks at the hardware it runs on.
- 2023
Surrealist's Dream
A GAN trained on surrealist photography and open-source imagery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a visual ancestor of these forms.
- 2024
UnBeautiful
Reclaimed female bodies from the idealized forms of popular AI models. The conceptual root of this release.
- 2025
Family Album
Models fine-tuned on archival family photographs. Their shapes and textures carry into the new work.
- 2026
Hardware && Hardware
The rawest of the three: the body taken hold of by the machine, and her most layered process to date.
Hardware && Hardware is about the body as a machine: the body as hardware, the mind as software. Since the seventeenth century, philosophers have described the body as a machine, an automaton with or without a soul to drive it. I return to that idea at a moment when AI is presented as weightless, and set the two hardwares side by side. Borrowing “&&” from programming, the logical AND, I like it as a machine-readable title: hardware AND hardware, true only when both sides are true.
I use that duality as a metaphor for AI. AI is not becoming conscious and nothing about it is ephemeral. It is calculation happening on chips. At the same time, we forget how remarkable our own bodies are as machines.
Here the machine gaze is reversed. Before, the machine looked at the human body. Now it looks at the hardware: an inner gaze, turned toward something it doesn’t realize it is running on. A model can never know what it runs on. It cannot gaze at itself or think about itself in the third person. That capacity, metacognition, thinking about one’s own thinking, belongs to humans. By placing the model’s own chips into the image it makes, I perform its self-recognition for it.
The work holds a tension I care about. On one side is wonder at how beautiful and capable our bodies are, which comes from a very personal experience of growing a human with my own body. On the other is how those bodies get appropriated by AI and extracted as training data. Sometimes the chips line up and feel like part of the body. Sometimes they read as alien intruders.
These figures are not a moment of becoming. They are the final destination of something that lives in between, the middle grounds that models learn in the latent space between concepts. Black and white, the absence of color, reminds me of zeros and ones, the native language of the hardware underneath. The glitches stay visible, because I don’t want to fool anyone into thinking this is reality. I want to bring the medium to the surface.
IN THEIR WORDS
IVONA TAU
THE PROCESS
From Photograph to Model
Ivona Tau's work begins with her own photographs and film. In her studio she scans the archive, explores the models she trains with a tool she built, and decides what each image keeps.
THE COLLECTION
50 unique works
Digital + Physical Editions
Every work in Hardware && Hardware can also be collected as a 24 × 24 inch print. Tau thinks of the two as one living system, like mind and body: the digital work is the software, the print is the hardware.
The prints are archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, a 100% cotton matte fine art paper, with a metallic layer that carries the transformer code across the microprocessor parts. Up close, the code is legible, and it appears on every print.
Each print is made to order, then individually hand signed and numbered by Ivona Tau.
Print Details
Paper / Material: Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, 100% cotton matte, with a metallic text layer
Size: 24 × 24 in (61 × 61 cm), unframed
Edition Sizes: One print per unique work
Signature: Individually hand signed and numbered by Ivona Tau
Digital Artwork: Included with every work and delivered to your wallet after purchase
Price: $250 USD, in addition to the digital work
Fulfillment: Please allow up to 10 weeks for delivery after purchase
Buyers are responsible for any applicable import duties or VAT on their print purchase.
Hardware && Hardware by Ivona Tau
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Collection Size
50 unique works
Each with a 24 × 24 in print -
Price
$250 USD per work
24 × 24 in print, $250 additional -
Pre-Sale
ICONIC Art Pass Holders
Monday, November 9 · 12 PM ET -
Public Sale
Open to all
Wednesday, November 11 · 12 PM ET
HOW TO
COLLECT
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ICONIC Art Pass holders collect first. The pre-sale opens Monday, November 9 at 12 PM ET, and the password and instructions are shared in the #holders-announcements channel of the ICONIC Discord. The public sale opens Wednesday, November 11 at 12 PM ET.
Choose your works and check out by credit or debit card. At checkout, enter the Ethereum wallet your digital works should be delivered to. Prints are claimed afterward through a separate print claim, and each print is made to order and hand signed and numbered by Ivona Tau. We’ll share the print claim dates and instructions by email.
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Hardware && Hardware is a collection of 50 unique works. Each is a one of one, priced at $250 USD, and each can be collected with its own 24 × 24 inch print.
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Every work can be collected with a 24 × 24 inch archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, with a metallic layer that carries the transformer code across the chips. Each print is $250 in addition to the digital work, made to order, and individually hand signed and numbered by Ivona Tau. Please allow up to 10 weeks for delivery after purchase. Buyers are responsible for any applicable import duties or VAT.
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Work made with third-party AI models is often impossible to reproduce once a company retires a version. Tau trains her own models and keeps their checkpoints in storage, so the system behind each work can be run again at any time.
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Hardware && Hardware is an ICONIC Curated Release. For questions about collecting, prints or delivery, contact the ICONIC Collector Services team at hello@iconicmoments.co.
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