English
Berlin-based artist Simon Denny has created a striking portrait series for New York Magazine’s latest “Power” issue, depicting 26 AI engineers, founders, and thinkers whose influence on artificial intelligence far exceeds their public recognition.
Portraits of the AI World’s Hidden Power Players
The magazine commissioned Denny to illustrate an article titled “So Few People, So Much Influence.” The piece profiles figures who are quietly shaping the future of AI. Among them is Logan Graham of Anthropic, whose work involves stress-testing AI models against extreme scenarios such as building bioweapons or executing cyberattacks. Also featured is Beth Barnes, founder of METR, a nonprofit that evaluates AI models before their public release, and Brendan Foddy of Mercor, a company training AI to take on roles across more industries.
Stay connected to every major update — subscribe and follow us on the PhoenixQ website and across our social media platforms.
The article resulted from a collaboration with Transformer, a Substack newsletter focused on the power and politics of AI. A footnote in the piece confirms that Denny used AI tools to generate the portraits themselves.
A Deliberately Dated Visual Style
Denny titled the series “Technologists Portraits.” Each image shows a smiling subject against an artificial-looking backdrop, rendered in the crackly, oversaturated palette of VHS-era video. The deliberately distorted, vintage aesthetic creates a sharp contrast with the enormous influence these largely unknown individuals hold over the technology shaping modern life.
Denny explained his thinking behind the visual approach. “With each major paradigm shift in the past 20 years, I have tried to map and unpack some of this community’s stories as they narrate our experience of a changing technological world,” he said. “The distortions of the final compositions are traces of the changes that are coming and the people bringing them about.”
A Career at the Intersection of Art and Technology
Denny has long explored the relationship between art and technology. In 2015, he represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale. His exhibition there, titled “Secret Power,” transformed internet servers into display cases for leaked documents about the National Security Agency and the intelligence-sharing alliance known as “Five Eyes,” involving the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
More recently, his work Output 0971 (2025), from his “Machine Painting” series, appeared in the exhibition “Sentient Earth” at Amant. He has also written about technology and aesthetics for Artforum, covering topics such as defense tech in April and prediction market platform Polymarket in October.
Denny told ARTnews that the mythology surrounding technology is central to his interest. “I’m interested in the stories that are woven by the people making the technology that we end up using,” he said. “It’s hard to parse what’s mythology and what’s truth when we’re confronting machine learning. This is why myth making is so important in the tech space. How does all of this become familiar and normalized?”
