A.I.”Art”

Written by

Bradley

The Intersection of Nature, Science, and AI. ArtSynopsis

I attended a lecture hosted by Novartis and below are my reflections. It was an introduction to Refik Anadol’s work, and certainly provided a lot of food for thought. A singular introduction to the broader realm of A.I. Art, something that I have not been convinced by, and this lecture didn’t convince me either.

“like the illustrations in our modern anatomies and physiologies they are abstractions that have never known and will never know any heightening of their blood pressure”.

– William M. Ivins, Jr.

First and foremost, his presentation style was overwhelming. A lot of information was presented in a short period of time; not inherently a negative, but it represents a thematic problem within their work.

This large volume of information coupled with his decision to incorporate significant distractions bright flashes of light, overwhelming colours and hype, culminates in an overpowering display of data.

Whilst the projects he and his team have created are interesting, reflective and intelligent. The end result is not art but data visualisation. By presenting XYZ million images and using the information from the wind or rain they create elaborate data visualisations without tailoring the piece to a human audience.

Put simply, they are overwhelming graphs that an individual cannot comprehend and so are labelled “awe-inspiring”. The lack of human scale is removed and thus removes these pieces from what i consider to be art. Both the talk and the works compromise Human Bandwidth – how much information a person can digest in a certain amount of time.1

The works rely on immersion and spectacle, filling rooms with light so that the viewer is blanketed, swamped, drowned, overwhelmed by the data. The data constantly flows and the conversation between the artist and the observer is lost. 2 Interpretation is impossible without essays of explanation and certainly the data cannot be comprehended without having your brain leak from your ears.

Scaled down to be more intuitive pieces without the absurd technicolour characteristics of light as a “pigment”,3 reduction of the value and contrast and importantly freezing of the movement would allow the genuine brilliance of the projects to shine. With this, a true dialogue could be opened between the artist and the observer.

Currently the works reflect a society that needs constant stimulation and explanitory texts.4 This was also furthered with his commentary on Unsupervised, an installation at the MOMA. Essentially a dyamic rendering of the the museums data including weather, sounds and more. Whilst a fundamentally interesting idea, it was ultmately reduced down to an attraction, with claims and pictures showing how long the queues of people were to see this piece. So is it art or an attraction? a fairground ride? Is the value of art how many people you can get through the door?

Reinterpretting a scene across the seasons has been done by the greates of artists and leads to astounding results. The work itself could take directly from this idea and producing renderings of the museum across the seasons with averaged data scaled down (!) and rendered in pigment could produce a serious body of work.

My last point is the works with the Yawanawá Tribes of the amazon, again an inspiring idea, rendered with the least amount of subtletly possible. Additionally the fundraising is generally a positive, allowing for convservation efforts, but what does 2.5 million $$$ on a block chain do for an amazonian tribe? I guess I am not tech enough to understand.

Ultimately the talk was interesting, I gained a lot from it and the studio is pushing the boundaries of something, the questions they’re asking need to be asked and I respect and laud them for it. It’s exciting to see what is happening. But we don’t have to accept everything that’s shoved down our throats and labelled as interesting or nutritious.

  1. This concept is not a new thing and refers to the capacity of an individual to process information both cognitively and emotionally. ↩︎
  2. Art relies on the distillation of an artists thoughts into a communicable form, this often stays within the bandwidth of conversation. Actually an interesting idea is that humans typically communicate at around 60 bits per second. ↩︎
  3. Fundamentally false, light is not a pigment especially in these works- unless he uses as of yet undisclosed technology – the works solely comprise of Red Green Blue. These colours shown in varying degrees produce the colours seen, basking in the glow of RGB vs actual pigments is a wildly different experience. ↩︎
  4. Maybe it really is art . ↩︎

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