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Ivona Tau: From Forest Gods to an ONX Fellowship in New York

Ivona Tau, who trains her own AI models on her photographs and family archives, is joining the Onassis ONX Fellowship in New York. A look at the work that got her there, from Mythic Latent Glitches on Tezos to Demons of the Night on Ethereum.

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On October 27 Ivona Tau announced that she is joining the Onassis ONX Fellowship, the research program of Onassis ONX in New York, alongside artists including Josh Kline, Marco Brambilla, Nancy Baker Cahill and Sarah Friend. The ONX fellows list also names Hana Omori of Keiken. The program gives artists studio access and dedicated technical and curatorial support for time bound, exploratory research, ending in a shared demo or project presentation.

Tau, who holds a PhD in AI with a focus on computer vision, starts every project with photography. Mythic Latent Glitches (2022) began with fog over the forest outside her parents' house near Vilnius, and with research into Lithuanian pagan spirits such as Žiburinis, a phosphorescent forest spirit, and Žemyna, the goddess of Earth. She trained a modified StyleGAN2-ADA model on several hundred of her own photographs, so that the AI designs the organic forms while her code programs their destruction: "Fog turns into smoke into burning radioactive forest." The 333 works were minted on fxhash on Tezos, and about 30% of them animate live in the browser when you press "A."

The same method runs through the rest of her work. Consciousness Horizons (2021), 7 works on Tezos, came from a custom neural network trained on her photography to explore "fragmented memories, and emotional states." Demons of the Night (2023) followed as 66 works on Ethereum. A Life Passed By (2025), shown at the ONX Showcase in Athens and a 2025 Lumen Prize finalist, goes further into the personal: it is trained on her grandparents' 8mm films and Soviet era negatives, many never developed, as a tribute to her grandmother, whose dementia blurred past and present. "The AI becomes not a historian but a dreamer," Tau writes.

In the past 2 weeks she has been posting her archive day by day: Mythic Latent Glitches #55 and #311, Consciousness Horizon: Sunset, Demons of the Night #21. Seen together, they make the case for the fellowship. The forest, the night and the family album are all hers. The model only learns to dream them.

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