Art for Technology’s sake — Re:Humanism and the Artistic Intelligence
We are living in an era of unrestrained run towards innovation, in which the human creative drive focuses on devices’ and machines’ functionality and efficiency, rather than on the main reason for the existence of technology, that is being a support for human life. However, with technology itself as the centre of progress, rather than mankind, we risk to neglect fundamental characteristics of the human mind a computer cannot provide: the artistic instinct, the sense of gusto, and the creative drive.
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Moreover, it is now a widespread commonplace that science and humanistic arts are two opposite entities and cannot reunite again as before. Back in centuries, in fact, engineers as Leonardo Da Vinci were also great artists and mathematicians as Galileo Galilei contributed to the European philosophical scene.
Nonetheless, in the last years there’s a newly found desire to explore original techniques and ideas in the world of fine arts, particularly in the brand-new frontier of Artificial Intelligence. Many countries’ contemporary art museums designate more and more space for installations and exhibitions which could reunite the creative, human genius with the power of computer, giving the floor to an original, innovative, artistic phenomenon with optimistic prospects for the future.
The Italian artistic scene is a clear example of this. The MAXXI museum of Rome staged exhibitions which could explore the conjunction between art and AI, as the two Low Form exhibitions, Artapesand Imaginaries and Visions in the age of Artificial Intelligence. While at Wired Next Fest in Milan, contemporary artist Alex Braga realised his musical project Artificial Musical Intelligence(A-Mint). The following year, in 2018, Alex Braga has then returned to the festival, held in Florence, with a show consisting of a duet between A-Mint and Francesco Tristano, worldwide renown musician and composer. Hito Steyerl’s The City of Broken Windows at Castello di Rivoli’s museum of contemporary art, moreover, explored how AI affects the urban environment we live in and how alternative forms of art could emerge through the use of such technologies.
Seeing such an interesting movement lying in the reconnection of arts with AI technologies — and being a fundamental part of our company’s culture — Alan Advantage has decided to run a contest to rediscover the link connecting the creative drive humankind has in both arts and science: Re:Humanism, “Art and Artificial Intelligence for a new Humanism”. With a cash prize for the top three artists and the possibility to exhibit one’s own masterpiece for the top 10 (in the AlbumArte independent exhibition space), the contest is the first edition of a competition proposing to investigate the advent of AI in the world of contemporary art, especially in the Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Robotics areas of interest.
In total the contest saw 114 participants, each of them with extremely compelling ideas. We have happily noticed that the 80% of the participants were Italian too, showing that something is moving in the country. There is a creative drive from the new generations, who are willing to take the challenge. Nevertheless, among the winners there are young artists of diverse nationalities and origins. We find a Vietnamese artist at the top, a Spanish-German team as number two, and a young Italian in third place.
Although the main theme of the contest is the implementation of AI in contemporary art, the winner of the first place did not imply the use of technology per se, It was its considerations on the theme that convinced us of its validity. Indeed, The Fall, by Nguyen Hoang Giang, involves a professional choreographer imitating the fall of a robot, subject to a balance test. In the act of imitating its fall the choreographer’s movements become increasingly mechanic. In this way, the audience realises how in the transformation towards a post-human, almost robotic existence, there is a fall, namely a symbolic act embodying the mistakes we find in every revolution. The work leads us to consider the theme of failure, where human fallibility becomes a cornerstone of the human-computer relations. If the goal is teaching computers to think as humans, should we consider the margin of fallibility in the calculations? And how could we deem whether the process of learning/teaching a fall is successful or not?
Nonetheless, all the works sent to us were extremely interesting, leading the jury itself to a deep reflection on the theme and the way it was confronted by the artists. This via audio and video installations and Machine Learning algorithms, as My Artificial Muse (second place), by Barqué-Duran Albert, Mario Klingemann, and Marc Marzenit, consisting of a computer involved in the composition of a painting. Then, a human painter, part of the team, tries to reproduce the computer’s work in real time, inspired by an artificial muse. Or yet, Devenir-fantôme (third place, winner of the residency prize), by Enrico Boccioletti, which explores the limits of mathematically calculating human emotions as boredom, surprise, affection, or desperation. This through tools of vocal synthesis and algorithmic composition, foreseeing a world stretching towards Technological Singularity.
The other 7 works, chosen for the exhibition at AlbumArte, were of equal interest. In the top 10 we find Adversarial Feelings by Lorem, an AV multidisciplinary project. The work explores the possibility to teach an AI human emotions and interactions, moving towards a “politics of representation” of such powerful, almost dangerous computers. The algorithm is coded to interpret the aesthetic standards our culture is based upon and to simulate the most complex human interactions.
Enrica Beccalli and Roula Gholmieh are, on the other hand, the authors of Complessità (Italian for Complexity). In their work, the human-computer relation stops being a command-and-execution, hierarchic relation and becomes an even collaboration. Through the use of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GSV) technologies, the machine instructs a professional dancer (with electrical impulses to the dancer’s ear, determining his/her balance) how to follow the complex movements of a flock of particles shown on a display behind, resembling a flock of birds without an apparent order. The poetry of such work lies in the desire to explain complexity through a computer’s algorithm. The human component of the work not only follows, but lets him/herself go with the flow of events representing a complexity too big to be put in order.
Guido Segni introduces Demand Full Laziness, today, representing a dystopian universe in which men’s laziness (consequence of super intelligent machines taking their place in labour and arts) contrasts with the eclectic, frenetic rhythms of modern society. The computer will be involved in a project of deep learning (in five years, from 2018 to 2023), in which it will replace the author’s creative work while portraying him idling during his spare time.
Grammar#1 by Antonio “Creo” Daniele, instead, asks us about what essentially means to be human. Exploring the artistic skills of an AI’s sketches, the author shows us the fundamental necessity to distinguish between the human and the computer work (an increasingly difficult task). The installation consists of a dialogue between men and machines, where the audience is involved in a game starting with the question “what is human?”. The dialogue taking place between the two not only is interesting for artistic and informative goals, but also for the scientific research on how men perceive themselves.
The experiment of Michele Tiberio and Diletta Tonatto, Me, My Scent, comes up as a unique piece of art. The author puts into play all his digital life in more-than-1500-page book, showing his activity on social as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or on his IPhone. Such catalogue shows how what we believe to be an abstract reality, that is the virtual cyberspace of our profiles, is true, instead. It is an almost tangible space, where our opinions leave a footprint. Not only, the original characteristic of the work is that the book releases a scent. That is a scent created not by the author, but by an algorithm, which calculated what the smell of his digital life should be. What we can smell is, thus, the essence of the author’s life, as it is calculated by an AI.
A Brief History of Western Cultural Production, by Adam Basanta, bases its considerations on a topic extremely important for the world of art, that is the cultural domination of the West. With a database of artefacts coming from different cultures and origins, mainly from the collection of The Metropolitan Museum, an algorithm will extract and re-contextualise the artefacts (previously decontextualized), trying to craft a “universal archaeological artefact”. The politic morale is crystal-clear, where the dominance of the western culture is questioned, but what the work wants to highlight is the contrast this politic morale has with the apolitic codification of the “raw data” softwares operates on.
Lastly, Urge Oggi (Italian for It is Essential Today) by Daniele Spanò, leads us to consider not only an AI’s artistic possibilities, but also its skills to entertain. The installation consists of two displays in which two hands (one per display) play rock-paper-scissors, namely an utterly random game. The interest of the author moves in the consideration that even a game dictated by casual mechanics, with no need of specific skills, can be competitive, fun, and can establish rivalries. From the very beginning, the audience realises that watching a machine exploring the random possibilities of the game does not affects us the same way as playing it ourselves. The game played by the machine does not show the same strategic dynamics, being the victory only a random event, not striking the audience’s expectations. The recreational feature becomes an example of the human essence, based on extralinguistic, psychologic, and semi-irrational elements. Hence, the artificial replica turns out to be a void, cold, almost futile moment.
Seeing such creative potential, Alan Advantage commits to extend the range of opportunities for participants in future editions and in the next months.
It is important to take a stand in this new reconnection between contemporary art and AI technologies. With this contest, and the following initiatives, Alan Advantage intends to research and realise a dialogue between humanism and technology, rediscovering the centrality of the human component in these years’ techno-scientific component. Indeed, we believe it is necessary to stop and consider what the progress is, which is not merely launch avant-garde products or the newest device on the market. Progress means also move forward towards a more sustainable and democratic use of technology. And what can help us think more than art?
