Simon Denny Portrays the AI Elite for New York Magazine's Power Issue
The Berlin-based artist was commissioned by New York Magazine to illustrate 26 influential AI engineers, founders and thinkers, generating portraits with an AI-assisted, VHS-like aesthetic.
For its latest “Power” issue, New York Magazine commissioned Berlin-based artist Simon Denny to illustrate the article “So Few People, So Much Influence,” profiling 26 AI engineers, founders and thinkers whose influence, as the piece frames it, far outstrips their fame. The commission places a contemporary artist at the center of a magazine's mapping of power in the AI sector.
A Cohort of Specialists
The profiled figures include Logan Graham of Anthropic, described in the source as working to push AI models toward extreme outcomes such as building a bioweapon or enacting a cyberattack; Beth Barnes, founder of METR, a nonprofit that tests AI models before release; and Brandan Foddy of Mercor, which trains AI models to take over more jobs and industries. The article was produced in collaboration with Transformer, a Substack newsletter about the power and politics of AI.
The VHS Aesthetic
A footnote to the article explains that Denny used AI to generate the portraits, which carry the look and feel of VHS tapes. Each work in the series, titled Technologists Portraits, shows a smiling figure against a fake-seeming backdrop in a crackly, oversaturated palette associated with vintage media. The dated, distorted style stands in deliberate contrast to the influence held by this cohort of relatively unknown AI experts.
Denny's portraits use an AI-generated, VHS-style distortion to frame a group whose influence, per the magazine, far exceeds its public recognition.
Mapping Technological Change
Denny framed the commission within a longer project of tracking technological shifts. “With each major paradigm shift in the past 20 years,” he explained, “I have tried to map and unpack some of this community’s stories as they narrate our experience of a changing technological world. The distortions of the final compositions are traces of the changes that are coming and the people bringing them about.”
The artist has long explored the intersection of art and technology and has recently written on the subject, including pieces for Artforum in April on the aesthetics of defense tech and in October on Polymarket. He represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 with “Secret Power,” a show that turned internet servers into vitrines displaying leaked documents and visual material about the National Security Agency and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
From Biennale to Machine Painting
More recently, Denny's Output 0971 (2025), from his “Machine Painting” series, was included in the exhibition “Sentient Earth” at Amant. His interest, he told ARTnews, lies in the stories woven by the people building technology. “It’s hard to parse what’s mythology and what’s truth when we’re confronting machine learning; it’s really unfamiliar even to those actors who are building it,” he said. “This is why myth making is so important in the tech space. How does all of this become familiar and normalized?”
The commission sits at the intersection of editorial image-making, emerging technology and the visual construction of influence—a subject the artist has pursued across biennale presentations and gallery exhibitions alike.
