*Well, it's a pretty blurry and messed-up area of tech art development at the moment. Kind of a grab bag, since "artificial intelligence" means all things to all people. I'm feeling more confident, though, that some of this GAN neural-net bot big-data deep-learner melange is in fact pretty useful for artists and that it will soon be better-understood. It won't subside into mush, mud, hype and hokum, and there won't be another "AI winter," either. Instead, it's going to clarify, and good work will get done.
It belongs in "Art News" because it is actual art news
“AI: More than Human,” an exhibition that appeared at London’s Barbican Art Gallery this past summer and can now be seen at the Forum in Groningen, the Netherlands, mirrors the muddled zeitgeist of artificial intelligence. It seeks to bring together the various elements of art, research, and commerce, displaying interactive installations as well as projects applying AI in fields as diverse as agriculture and neuroscience. Rather than untangle these distinct areas, Barbican curator Anna Holsgrove has chosen to intermix them under sections titled the Dream of AI, Mind Machines, Data Worlds, and Endless Evolution.
I saw the show in the company of computational artist Memo Akten, who has been at the forefront of many micro-movements, learning new tools to study how they expand human creativity. At the Barbican, Akten presented the latest iteration of Learning to See (2017), an interactive installation in which machine-learning software analyzes a live feed from a camera pointed at a table covered with everyday objects. The software interprets this visual input based on data sets, sourced online, that contain tens of thousands of images—ocean views, fires, flowers, and star fields. Viewers are invited to rearrange the objects, and the software reinterprets these configurations depending on whether it is set to see flowers or stars, then projects its findings on a wall. A piece of fabric, sunglasses, and headphones can look like a blooming garden or a stretch of the cosmos.
In a recent interview, Akten noted that when people talk about AI they are usually referring to “big data-driven methods or systems.”¹ So-called AI art is created by making aesthetic choices when sourcing and selecting datasets....
