In March 2019, Sotheby’s London sold “Memories of Passersby I” by the German artist Mario Klingemann at its Contemporary Art Day Auction, with an estimate of 30,000 to 40,000 pounds. It was the first work created with artificial intelligence to be offered at Sotheby’s, coming just months after Christie’s Belamy sale.
Unlike a printed picture, the piece is a self-contained machine. According to the Sotheby’s lot description, it consists of a custom chestnut-wood console housing an AI “brain” connected to two 4K screens, on which a complex system of neural networks generates “a never-ending stream of portraits” pixel by pixel, in real time, without drawing from a stored database. Klingemann trained the underlying generative adversarial networks on thousands of historical portraits and tuned the system toward his own aesthetic, producing unsettling, dreamlike faces that never repeat. Because the output is continuous and unique, no two viewers ever see exactly the same artwork.
The work reframed what was being sold: not a fixed image but a generative process that keeps producing new art for as long as it runs.
Why business readers should care: Memories of Passersby I moved AI art past the “print made by an algorithm” stage and sold the machine itself, hinting at a market for living, generative systems rather than static outputs - a model that later resurfaced in NFT and on-chain generative art.