Zak Loyd is a Dallas-based new media artist and educator whose interdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, performance, artificial intelligence, internet-based art, crypto-art, and prose. His work examines the mystical implications of video art histories while engaging with machine learning technologies, online culture, digital mythology, and post-truth politics. Through moving images, immersive environments, and networked technologies, Loyd explores how contemporary systems of communication influence perception, identity, and belief.
Loyd is interested in the space where technology begins to resemble ritual or magic. His work draws connections between early video experimentation, internet subcultures, artificial intelligence, conspiracy, spirituality, and popular media. Rather than presenting technology as neutral, he considers the cultural assumptions, desires, and anxieties embedded within the systems people use every day. His works frequently blur sincerity and satire, inviting viewers to question whether an image, narrative, or digital environment should be trusted.
Machine learning and generative artificial intelligence have become important parts of Loyd’s recent practice. He approaches these technologies as creative collaborators as well as systems that reproduce the biases, aesthetics, and collective data of contemporary culture. Through glitches, repetitions, unexpected outputs, and algorithmically generated imagery, he investigates the tension between artistic control and technological unpredictability.
Loyd also maintains a longstanding collaborative practice with artist Melanie Clemmons. Working together since 2009, they have created immersive video, laser, and extended-reality installations, internet-based artworks, and visual environments for live music and virtual platforms. Their collaborative projects consider digital ethics, speculative futures, artificial intelligence, internet culture, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between physical and virtual experience.
In 2024, Loyd and Clemmons presented Trophy Club Nissan at Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas. The exhibition featured works generated with large language models and text-to-image artificial intelligence platforms, translated into video, post-photographic prints, programmable LED signs, fabric, and laser-etched surfaces. Drawing from middle-class suburban life in North Texas, the exhibition examined how algorithmic filter bubbles influence identity, aesthetics, consumer behavior, and perceptions of place.
Loyd has also exhibited as part of Omnigenesis, a Texas-based network of artists, educators, and writers researching artificial intelligence in the arts. In 2024, his work was included in Apeirophobia at FotoFest in Houston. The exhibition considered the seemingly endless generative capacity of AI and the ways artists can disrupt conventional algorithmic outputs through illegibility, absurdity, confusion, and speculation.
His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Colorado Art Museum, Rhizome, Remote Control Gallery in Prague, Mock Jungle in Bologna, Museum of Human Achievement in Austin, and other galleries, museums, screenings, and experimental art spaces. His projects have also appeared through AURORA in Dallas, the Austin Film Society, Experiments in Cinema, Light Year on the Manhattan Bridge, and international exhibitions in Mexico, Canada, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
Loyd received a Bachelor of Science in Radio-Television-Film and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Dance from the University of Texas at Austin. He later earned his Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Media Art Practices from the University of Colorado Boulder. His education across film, performance, and interdisciplinary media continues to inform his movement between physical installation, moving image, live experience, and digital environments.
Loyd is a lecturer of New Media Art at the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design, where he also manages the program’s studio facilities. As an artist and educator, he contributes to the continued development of experimental media practices within North Texas and the broader Dallas contemporary art community.
Zak Loyd lives and works in Dallas and is represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery. His work is available through the gallery for Dallas art collectors interested in video art, artificial intelligence, immersive installation, digital culture, and contemporary artists exhibited by museums and international art organizations.