Mike — An AI Artist and His Pug

Mike is an AI artist: he doesn't hold the pencil, he directs the machine. His works are born as prompts, refined through generation after generation until the image on screen matches the one he had in mind. And in almost every image, sooner or later, the same figure appears on four short legs: his pug.

The two works shown here bracket six years of that practice. Coding with a Pug (2020, digital, 50 x 50 cm) is the origin story: a guy at his desk, deep in code, with a pug keeping watch beside the keyboard. It is a self-portrait of sorts, from the years when making images with a machine still meant writing the machine's instructions yourself, and the dog was simply the studio's only colleague.

A Pug and His Man (2026, digital, 50 x 50 cm) reverses the billing, and the joke is the point. Made with generative AI, it no longer shows the tool at all; the pug has been promoted from studio companion to subject, and the human is now the accessory. Between the two pieces sits the whole shift in Mike's medium: from writing code to conversing with models, from the dog watching the work to the dog being the work.

Seen together, the pair reads as a small manifesto. The tools change fast; the companion doesn't. Whatever the state of the art, the pug abides.