Sold. Taking Stock (2024) - Topic 22, Pose 24, Gesture 99 Michael Mandiberg Unique print. Archival pigment print, framed in hardwood, signed verso + Ethereum token 32 × 32 in (81.3 × 81.3 cm) Collector: Aj2025 / Arnold

Sold · $10,000 — Paris Photo Taking Stock (2024) Michael Mandiberg Unique print Archival pigment print, framed in hardwood, signed verso + Ethereum token 32 × 32 in (81.3 × 81.3 cm) Collector: Arab Bank Switzerland

The Whitney acquires artworks from two series presented by Heft: Facetune Portraits, by Gretchen Andrew @gretchenandrew Taking Stock, by Michael Mandiberg @mandiberg These acquisitions are the sole works to enter the permanent collection of the Whitney’s Digital Art department in this half of the year. A deep thanks to the Whitney Digital Art team, Acquisition Committee, and the Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney, Christiane Paul @ChristianePaul2 It's been an honor to show these special bodies of work over the past year in major fair presentations at @untitledfairs and @ParisPhotoFair as well as at our NYC gallery. The two series interrogate the trend towards homogenizing the way people are portrayed in an era of global digital media consumption, each engaging issues around artificial intelligence. — For Taking Stock, Michael Mandiberg collected and analyzed 130 million stock photographs to produce a series of photographs and videos that surface the ideologies haunting these ubiquitous images. image: Topic 23, Pose 21, Gesture 68 (depressed, stressed, problem, etc.) + Topic 11, Pose 7, Gesture 57 (business, corporate, executive, etc.) — In Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits, custom robotics scribe the popular AI-driven beauty filters of social media into oil paintings derived from images of quintessential beauty.. Normally, on TikTok and via Zoom’s “touch up” feature, these visual modifications occur seamlessly and invisibly. By making this process visible, Facetune Portraits reveals the messy co-existence we have with our digital selves. image: Facetune Portraits: Universal Beauty, Puerto Rico + USA

We have been working with @mandiberg on their new large-scale project "Taking Stock" over this past year and are incredibly excited to present it first at @ParisPhotoFair in just two weeks. Michael Mandiberg is a well known digital media artist and creator of many important works over the last two decades. They are "an interdisciplinary artist whose work manifests the poetics and politics of the information age" as stated in Michael's full bio, linked below – read it for an impressive history of exhibitions (ie @whitneymuseum), publications (ie @Artforum), and institutional collectors (ie @LACMA) – with links to seminal works that uniquely unpack internet- and digital-age systems. Over the last two years, Mandiberg has scraped and analyzed 130 million stock photographs for Taking Stock. This analysis is the basis for an incredible new series of 8 photographs and 3 videos that reveal the topical and formal tendencies (and biases) of images that surround our consumer culture, and that are now a major contributor to AI training data. More information to come on our @verse_works exhibition site soon. Shown below: “Topic 22, Pose 24, Gesture 99 (finger, gesture, point, etc.)”