What’s new — March 2019
A monthly newsletter about Artists + Machine Intelligence
Hello, friends.
As I try to keep pace with the shifting landscape of AI creativity, and art and technology discourse, I find my attention is rewarded at whatever scale I choose to observe. From github repos to auction houses — change, advancement, and complexification are everywhere.
Here are a few things that caught my brain as it melted in a sea of ML and media this month:
Last month, we witnessed the non-release of OpenAI’s GPT2 language generation model, a “deepfakes for text” that was deemed too dangerous to publish by its creators. While the call for greater consideration is laudable, and the output of GPT2 impressive, I wonder how this might change norms in research, and who will regulate the use of models that might be too potent for public release. Or is it all just canny marketing?
At the more calming speed of art history, Berlin’s DAM Gallery hosts an exhibition of work by good old-fashioned AI co-creator Harold Cohen. I believe Cohen’s work will one day be seen as pivotal in the emerging creative relationship between animals and intelligent machines, so it’s heartening to see this work exhibited alongside modern practitioners like Casey REAS, whose Compressed Cinema exhibition will open at DAM Gallery on March 22. All of the works in Compressed Cinema use generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create ephemeral, dreamlike images that oscillate between clarity and ambiguity. Casey’s research is supported with Google’s Focused Research Award, and, in my opinion, it’s some of the most thoughtful and beautiful GAN work being made. A selection of these works will be on view at Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair April 11–14, 2019, as part of a dedicated project space presented by A+MI and publisher Anteism Books. (More details soon!)
If you, like me, are still feeling a bit rushed by all of this progress, you might find solace in Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s drawings on view at Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ramón y Cajal, an aspiring artist, was pushed into science in the late 1800s, and managed to found the field of neuroscience while also creating works of art. Remind yourself that anything is possible, and that the brain is a flat circle, or at least it looks like one in these gorgeous drawings by the guy who discovered the freaking neuron.
Looking ahead, for those of you attending SXSW next week, please join me for a panel conversation on Humanizing Innovation Through Artist Residencies with Domhnaill Hernon, Head of Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.) at Nokia Bell Labs and Sarah Newman, Artist and Creative Researcher at metaLAB at Harvard University, moderated by curator and cultural producer Julia Kaganskiy.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not send out a great congratulation to friend and collaborator Refik Anadol for receiving the 2019 Florence Biennale’s Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award for New Media and Installation Art. We’re honored to collaborate with you and the studio, Refik.
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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