What’s new — February 2019
A monthly newsletter about Artists + Machine Intelligence
Hello Friends,
When we launched Artists + Machine Intelligence in February 2016 with an inaugural exhibition and benefit auction at San Francisco’s Gray Area, we imagined that the nascent field of machine learning-enabled creation would eventually turn up in prominent places. But it was impossible to envision precisely the breadth and depth of influence that artist AI projects would soon come to have. What was once a niche field of computer science is now a flexible tool for artists and a subject of intense consideration, politically, philosophically, and creatively.
In 2018, alongside a passionate community of longtime creative ML practitioners, we’ve seen:
1) Major museums begin to explore the role of technology, tool-making, and creative AI: Barbican’s AI: More than Human, MoMA’s New Order: Art and Technology in the 21st Century
2) Artists pushing ML aesthetics by building their own datasets and GANs: Anna Ridler’s Mosaic Virus
3) New forms of architectural and musical storytelling with AI: Refik Anadol’s collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, WDCH Dreams
4) Interactive public poetry co-written by ML: Es Devlin’s Please Feed the Lions
5) Projects from leading contemporary artists new to AI collaboration: Hito Steyerl’s The City of Broken Windows, Pierre Huyghe’s Uumwelt
6) And even two new instances of AI art on the auction block: Christie’s auction of Obvious’s Portrait of Edmond Belamy, and Sotheby’s auction of Mario Klingemann’s Memories of Passerby I
Our own team is growing. In March 2018, artist and creative technologist Ross Goodwin joined A+MI to support Refik Anadol’s WDCH Dreams, and designed the algorithm that powered Es Devlin’s Please Feed the Lions. Now, Eva Kozanecka joins from the Museum of Modern Art to help scale our efforts across our artist and research grant funding, public programming, and storytelling initiatives.
We’re also pleased to announce the opening of Lauren McCarthy’s SOMEONE at 205 Hudson Gallery, as part of Reconfiguring the Future. Lauren is a recipient of Google’s Focused Research Awards, and we hope her interventions in the human-AI agent relationship will not only surface insightful critique of the agent and smart home, but will also progress a hybrid practice of architectural, software-based performance.
There is a lot more to come, and in 2019, I want to share news with you more personally.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be speaking at Frieze Week at NeueHouse (Los Angeles) with Claire Evans on art and machine learning practices, and with Julia Kaganskiy at SXSW (Austin) on art and technology residencies. I hope you can join me in-person. Whenever possible, we’ll share excerpts of conversations, filmed or transcribed, online.
You can also expect more posts like this one, every month, right here on our Medium publication.
I look forward to sharing with you what’s top of my mind, and I encourage you to do the same in the comments below, on Twitter or via email: artwithMI@google.com
Thank you for your attention, and thank you for co-creating with us.
Kenric
Artists + Machine Intelligence (AMI) is a program at Google Arts & Culture that invites artists to work with engineers and researchers together in the design of intelligent systems.
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