The Masquerade
Digital painting made with custom generative software, 2025
Courtesy of Kanbas Collection
Sam Spratt’s Luci series is composed of his digital paintings and written poems. They follow the character Luci as they move from solitude toward the network of humanity. X. Masquerade is the most recent installment in this branching narrative, a large-scale digital painting that also unfolds as an exercise in collective storytelling for Spratt’s online community of collectors.
Trained as a painter, Spratt blends classical techniques with digital methods. To create Masquerade and the Masks of Luci, he developed an elaborate generative AI engine trained on his archive of digital paintings, down to each individual brushstroke. His aim was to “explore what it means to evolve with and through a machine. Not to outsource my dreams, but to execute them in exact form with 1,000 clones of my hands.” The resulting digital paintings are a mix of generative work trained on his past combined with handmade work from the present. Each new creation adds to the system and informs the future of the project.
A subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models trained on large data sets to create new content—text, images, music, or videos—by mimicking the underlying structures, patterns, and styles of what it was trained on. Popular commercial generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney use a chatbot feature where users can prompt the AI system using natural language rather than code. These large-scale systems are trained using trillions of data points collected from the internet and are controversial for the way they appropriate (and imitate) existing intellectual property and for their energy usage and environmental impact.