Besties is a contemporary bestiary by Atay Ilgun, comprising 300 creatures imagined through language alone.
The project draws a parallel between large language models and medieval artists who depicted animals they had never encountered, relying instead on travelers’ accounts, oral histories, and inherited texts. Their incomplete knowledge produced hybrid beings that existed between observation, mythology, and speculation.
Ilgun describes Besties as a form of digital neomedievalism, placing machine intelligence within a similar condition: constructing an unfamiliar ecology from mediated knowledge rather than direct visual experience.
Each creature begins with a textual prompt given to a large language model, which is instructed to generate SVG code rather than a conventional image. Every path, shape, gradient, and curve is produced through language, then rendered into a visible form.
The works do not rely on an image-generation model, visual template, or pre-existing composition. Instead, they test how a linguistic model translates its understanding of anatomy, color, character, and spatial relationships into structured, executable imagery.
The resulting creatures become capability traces, recording what the system understands, approximates, and invents when language is the sole foundation for visual imagination.
Where medieval bestiaries often used monsters to represent danger and the unknown, the creatures of Besties emerge as colorful, rounded, and strangely lovable companions.
Ilgun calls this transformation Cute Accelerationism: a process through which the threatening forms of mythology are domesticated by the aesthetic preferences of online culture, where charm and immediate emotional appeal are rewarded.
Recorded on-chain, the works preserve the provenance of these early acts of machine imagination, while their presentation within the CVPR 2026 art program places them in conversation with wider developments in artificial intelligence.
Each Bestie exists simultaneously as a digital companion, an executable image, and a timestamped artifact of an evolving technological moment.
Besties consists of 300 unique works. A portion of the collection is reserved for the artist, curators, archives, and future exhibitions, with additional access allocated to members of the early AI and on-chain art communities, alongside holders of Ilgun’s earlier projects, including Realiti and A.I.F.X.
The remaining works will be released through a public mint.
Supply: 300
Release date: Tuesday, June 30 at 12:00 PM ET
Allowlist duration: 24 hours
Allowlist price: 0.03 ETH
Allowlist limit: 3 per wallet
Public sale price: 0.05 ETH
Public sale limit: 5 per wallet
