Davy Smith is a digital media artist, researcher and creative technologist. His practice bridges artificial intelligence research and contemporary visual art. Rather than using machine learning as a mere instrument, he approaches the AI model as an artwork’s primary subject: an entity with its own history, systemic habits and emergent motivations.
His recent work explores the combination of multiple AI models, algorithmic behaviour and spatial computation alongside DIY hardware, making moving-image, photographic and generative pieces that come from the systems’ own structure rather than from imitating existing images. He holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London, on intrinsically motivated neuro-evolutionary algorithms — how curious, exploratory behaviour can become a directed, creative process.
He has also built tools for other artists and institutions: William Blake's London, an iOS app for Tate; Aleph Project, a platform for location-based artworks, with Daniel Carey; and The Cutting Room, an object-based media tool that edits a film for each viewer, first shown with What is Love? at York Mediale in 2018. He worked as creative technologist on Ronan Devlin’s Worstedopolis, a generative work projected onto Bradford City Hall for BD: is LIT 2025.