What is AMI?

What do art and technology have to do with each other? What is machine intelligence, and what does “machine intelligence art” look, sound and feel like? What are the emerging relationships between humans and machines; what does it mean to be human; and what can we learn about intelligence, human or otherwise, through art? How should we think about our future?

These are some of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves, especially in the wake of a series of breakthroughs in neural network-generated imagery beginning in the summer of 2015. Artists and Machine Intelligence is a long-term collaboration we’ve begun to explore these questions through art. It brings together artists and thinkers, researchers, engineers, and, of course, the machine intelligences these researchers and engineers are building.

We’ll also try to think our way through the big questions in a series of essays. The first essay, Art in the Age of Machine Intelligence, introduces many of the themes we hope to develop over time in more detail.

Grateful thanks to co-organizers of AMI, without whom there would be no program, and other readers who have given editorial feedback: Andrea Held, Alison Lentz, Kenric McDowell, Mike Tyka, Doug Fritz, Charina Choi, Jac de Haan, Adrienne Fairhall, Rafa Yuste, Allen Lau, and David Lowe.