The Work of Art in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction
As artificial intelligence seeps into our lives, artists are exploring AI both as a tool and in its impact on our humanness.
Anna Ridler’s Fall of the House of Usher unspools, rooms and bodies spreading half-seen across the frames of this 12-minute film like gossamer. A woman appears to walk down a hallway, then melts into a moonlit sky. A face appears in the dark, contorts into shapes. The animation is based on a 1929 film version of Edgar Allen Poe’s story, but its inky and strange visuals are the result of something altogether more modern: machine learning.
Each moment of Ridler’s film has been generated by artificial intelligence. The artist took stills from the first four minutes of the 1929 movie, then drew them with ink on paper. These versions were then used to train a generative adversarial network (GAN), teaching it what sort of picture should follow on from another. The GAN uses this information to create its own procession of stills, based around a pair of networks that work in competition with each other — one as a generator, one as a discriminator, evaluating the work of the former like an algorithmic critic.
