BÅRD
IONSON

Bård Ionson has been creating digital art since 2012, working at the intersection of AI, generative systems, and NFT culture — among the earliest crypto artists to explore AI-generated characters on the blockchain.

The Freaky Faces were born out of AI experimentation: using a system called SPADE-Face trained on the CelebA dataset of celebrity faces, Bård learned to manipulate the model and push it toward generating ugly, unexpected, freaky characters the AI was never designed to make.

Each face was crudely sketched by hand, then fed to the GAN which hallucinated the rest of the details. The results were then animated using First Order Model — giving each character movement and voice.

Only 50 Freaky Faces were ever created. The collection lives on the Ethereum blockchain.