AI Bugs: Digital Organisms at the Threshold of Machine Error and (Post)Natural Evolution
Curated by Diane Drubay
Exhibition: MACHINA FAUNA, Galerie Data, Paris, 2025
Medium: PNG, 1080px, MidJourney
I don’t debug—I amplify the flaws // Frederik De Wilde
In the AI Bug series, artist De Wilde advances a sophisticated inquiry into the liminal space between technological malfunction and emergent digital ecologies, extending the conceptual lineage of their prior AI Beetle series. The earlier works, serving as foundational seed imagery, were input into MidJourney and modulated through meticulously constructed prompts to generate the AI Bug iterations. The AI Beetles distinguish themselves through their intricate provenance: initially modeled in three-dimensional form, their complex surface patterns emerged from a custom neural network and evolutionary algorithms designed to disrupt artificial intelligence-driven metadata labeling systems. This innovative methodology, developed in a pioneering 2015 collaboration with the AI Lab at Wyoming University, positioned the AI Beetles as both aesthetic objects and agents of counter-surveillance, encoding resistance within their formal structure.
The AI Bug series poses a provocative question: can generative artificial intelligence reinterpret these metadata-encoded patterns—originally conceived as obfuscatory mechanisms—to produce entities analogous to genetic progeny within a synthetic ecosystem? The resultant forms are arresting, oscillating between the recognizable and the uncanny. These AI Bugs simultaneously evoke viral pathologies and ethereal machine spirits, a duality that imbues them with substantial conceptual resonance. This tension articulates a nuanced dialogue between organic evolutionary processes and the synthetic mutations inherent in algorithmic generation, situating the works at the intersection of (post)natural and machinic paradigms.
The title AI Bug engages deftly with the historical etymology of “bug” within technological discourse, a term with antecedents stretching back to the 19th century. Engineers of that era, including Thomas Edison—who in 1878 employed “bug” to denote mechanical defects—laid the groundwork for its adoption. The term’s computational significance crystallized in 1947, when Grace Hopper’s team, diagnosing a fault in the Harvard Mark II, extracted a moth from a relay and documented it as the “first actual case of a bug being found.” Though “bug” predated this incident, Hopper’s anecdote entrenched its place in the lexicon of computing. By World War II, “debugging” had entered military and radar engineering vocabularies, later evolving into a foundational practice in software development—the systematic excision of errors from code. Within this genealogy, AI Bug transcends nominal wordplay, positioning itself as a critical reflection on the legacy of technological imperfection and its remediation.
De Wilde’s deployment of generative tools to reinterpret the AI Beetles mirrors the debugging process, yet subverts its telos. Rather than purging flaws, the artist amplifies them, transmuting algorithmic glitches into spectral, viral morphologies that interrogate prevailing notions of agency and authorship in digital art. This methodological inversion—celebrating rather than resolving error—aligns the series with a broader critique of artificial intelligence’s presumed seamlessness, exposing the productive potential of its ruptures.
For scholars and collectors of NFT-based practices, the AI Bug series offers a multifaceted field of investigation. It interweaves historical resonance, an animistic algorithmic ancestry, and a speculative aesthetic that refracts both past and future through a media-archaeological lens. The works exemplify the capacity of digital art to function as a site of temporal convergence, where the mechanical “bugs” of Edison’s era resonate with the emergent ontologies of contemporary AI. Presented within the MACHINA FAUNA exhibition at Galerie Data, Paris, in 2025, curated by Diane Drubay, this series asserts its place within a lineage of media art that probes the boundaries of the organic and the synthetic, the erroneous and the intentional. Rendered in PNG format at 1080px via MidJourney, the AI Bugs stand as both artifacts and provocations, inviting sustained engagement with the evolving discourses of technology, ecology, and artistic production.
