Evolution + Foundation Exhibition

William Latham Stephen Todd
Dylan Banarse Google DeepMind

AI Art at The Oxo Gallery, South Bank, London

PV: October 16th 2025

Open to public: October 17th – 26th, daily 11am – 6pm

Curator: Frederic Fol Leymarie

Evolution + Foundation

William Latham Stephen Todd
Dylan Banarse Google DeepMind

This exhibition showcases a pioneering art/ technology collaboration in which Google’s Gemini acts as the artist, directing the evolution of complex 3D forms.

Weaving together the huge themes of Generative Art, Evolution and AI, this exhibition shows for the first time work from a new and exciting research collaboration between pioneering artist William Latham, his long-term collaborator, mathematician Stephen Todd, and Google DeepMind Research Engineer Dylan Banarse. It is curated by Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie from Goldsmiths. For the first time, this work sees the artist fully hand over aesthetic and content decisions to an AI, replacing the human artist/selector with the machine in a human-directed co-creative process.

Introducing "Foundational Evolution"

This novel collaborative work has led to a new type of AI-guided evolution, for which Banarse has coined the term "Foundational Evolution". At its heart is Gemini, a foundation model trained on vast amounts of text and images. This allows Gemini to interpret abstract visuals in a human-like way, performing the equivalent of Rorschach’s "Ink Blot Test" by finding meaning in complex forms.
In this exhibition, the genetic mechanisms and unique 3D "form-growing" grammar developed by Latham and Todd over the past thirty-five years are married with Gemini. Emulating evolutionary principles, the system starts from a simple geometric form. The grammar and its parameters are then mutated by their custom software, Mutator, to generate multiple variants.
These many variants are then handed over to Gemini to be judged - a process traditionally done manually by the artist. Based on its understanding of the forms and driven by Google DeepMind's "evolutionary prompts," Gemini identifies “winners” and weeds out “losers” in a Darwinian-style selection, pitting organic forms against each other in what Banarse calls "binary tournaments". It uses a "success-scoring system" and explains each of its selection decisions to retain or discard images. The result is a system that generates complex natural forms that resemble viruses, antlers, diatoms, horseshoe crabs, dragonflies and much more.

Inside the Exhibition

The generated forms are displayed in the exhibition as large evolutionary trees, showing the steps over hundreds of generations which the viewer can explore. The machine dialogue generated by the selection process makes for fascinating reading, providing a sort of window into the workings of the AI and itself forms an integral part of the Exhibition.
The work remains in the style of William Latham’s Evolutionary Art, dating back to his intricate hand-drawn works in the late 1980s, further developed over the years in his computer art created in collaboration with Stephen Todd. They incorporate a wealth of artistic influences such as Surrealism, William Morris and science-fiction images and this exhibition references, in particular, their current preoccupation with the 16th Century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo with his fantastical, composite portraits made up of objects such as vegetables, flowers and branches, fish and books.
The exhibition includes three of Latham's original hand-drawn evolutionary drawings from the mid-eighties to contextualise the new work, as well as a unique two-voice 'podcast' fully generated by the AI which describes and reflects on the genesis of the work.
This exciting research collaboration started in mid-2024 and continues with a rich set of ongoing research goals.
The exhibition catalogue includes an introduction by Melanie Lenz, Digital Curator from The V&A Museum.
The exhibition is sponsored by Google DeepMind.

Evolution and Foundation AI: Components

FormSynth: William Latham’s original rule-based process of hand-drawn creation
FormGrow: Mathematical rule-based process of creation invented by William Latham and Stephen Todd
Mutator: Created by Stephen Todd and William Latham for the human artist to mutate and evolve FormGrow entities
Gemini: Google DeepMind’s latest AI, a foundation model trained on text, images, video and audio. Using language it can reason over complex problems and crossmodal concepts.
Evolution and Foundation: a pioneering collaboration where Gemini AI acts as the artist, directing the evolution of complex 3D forms.
Gemini’s roles:
Aesthetic Judge: Articulating and comparing visual qualities and concepts.
Experiment Analysis: Writing evolutionary overviews and summarising generational events.
Audio Overview: Generating audio discussions based on experiment results and exhibition notes.