Simon Denny Gives New York Magazine's AI Power List a VHS Look
Berlin-based artist Simon Denny has drawn the portraits for New York Magazine's AI power feature, and he made them with artificial intelligence (AI), the software that can generate images and text from simple instructions.
The magazine commissioned Denny to illustrate its Power issue article "So Few People, So Much Influence." The feature itself, "26 Quietly Powerful People Shaping the Future of AI," profiles 26 engineers, founders and thinkers. New York Magazine says it set out to identify the new AI elite, the small group of people deciding how the technology is built and used.
Denny is a multi-media artist. He makes sculptures, paintings and installations, and his work looks at the forces that shape technology companies and the people who run them. For this project, he used AI to generate the portraits, and they have the look and feel of VHS tapes, the video cassettes many people watched at home in the 1980s and 1990s. ArtNews reported that the series is called Technologists Portraits.
The article was produced with Transformer, a Substack newsletter, the kind of subscription email publication that many writers run independently. Transformer covers the power and politics of AI. The collaboration brought a specialist newsletter into a general-interest magazine's feature.
Denny's own website now hosts a press page for the project, titled "New York Magazine: The Power Issue 2026 – AI." The page sits alongside his wider body of work, which New York Magazine describes as focused on technology companies and digital culture.
For readers, the project pairs a list of names with a visual style that looks backwards, at a technology that is moving fast. The people profiled are the subject of the written feature, and the portraits are the artist's response to them. Both appear in the same issue.
