Achi news desk-
TTwo people dressed in black are kneeling on the floor, so they must be in pain for sure. If they’re grimac, there’d be no way of knowing – their features are obscured by oversized smooth gold masks, as if they’ve buried their faces in half an Easter egg.
Their stillness makes them appear like statues, and only by checking for the subtle rise and fall of their chests can you confirm that they are indeed human. Which is fitting, really – because they’re not really human, at least not quite. They are human-machine hybrids, “Idioms”, created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his biggest ever exhibition, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.
Idioms is touring the exhibition for its run between March and November. Sensors in their masks monitor the rooms they sit in and the visitors they encounter, and artificial intelligence will gradually translate this information into a brand new language. Slowly, for example, the Idiom masks will create the words for “door” or “human beings” or “write” – building a dictionary until they can even communicate with each other . Every day, their knowledge will accumulate; Huyghe wonders what they would be able to say in 20 years’ time.
On a crisp March day, just before the exhibition opens to the public, two Idioms kneel in a dark room opposite a large black box hanging from the ceiling – this is a “self-produced instrument” (which is also loaded with environmental sensors), producing ambient music and crisscrossing light beams. In response to the artwork in front of them, the Idioms seem to have produced only a few syllables, which are repeated intermittently over and over again as the LED screens on their foreheads glow gold Their words are a hissing whisper. It sounds a lot like, “What’s this?”
It’s a fair question to ask. The dilemma facing any artist trying to tackle such a changing and era-defining subject as artificial intelligence is that the real magic often happens on some hard drives behind the scenes. curtains. While a blinking server was on display at Liminal, Huyghe himself admitted at a press conference three days before opening that it might be difficult for a casual visitor to understand that the language coming from the masks of the Idioms is produced by AI; he was worried that visitors would assume that the people wearing the masks are the ones whispering.
For contemporary artists, there is an obvious pressure to address and engage with the busy technology that has rapidly disrupted everything from homework to journalism since the debut of ChatGPT in 2022.
Like Huyghe, creative people from German filmmaker Hito Steyerl to British conceptualist Gillian Wearing have used AI to make or enhance their art. Shortly after Liminal’s first run ends, a multimedia exhibition of the historical works of French artist Philippe Parreno will open at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which is fully driven by AI.
It is not always easy to discern whether artists are using the technology in an interesting and challenging way or are hoping to jump on the hype bandwagon. From an introductory press release from the Munich show, it’s not clear exactly which elements of Parreno’s display will be artificially intelligent, and it’s easy to see how AI could be cynically slapped onto a display like an Instagram filter, a shiny veneer that does old work. appear new.
AI is already all around us, auto-completing our emails, suggesting a new show to watch on Netflix, and reading the weather forecast in the voice of Amazon’s Alexa. In recent years, chatbots have revolutionized writing – responding to prompts to write cover letters, code, plays, poems, and essays – while text-to-image models such as DALL.E and Midjourney allow anyone to create “art” by typing in a few words.
But as the technology becomes more prominent in our everyday lives, artists’ use of AI risks feeling trite. Crowds are said to have been “transformed for an hour or more” by Turkish artist Refik Anadol’s “living paintings” currently on display at London’s Serpentine Gallery. AI acquired imagery from rainforests and coral reefs to produce a Breathtaking exhibition, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, which features an immersive “artificial reality” that visitors can wander through. Although crowds can be transformed, critics have said Anadol’s previous AI-generated work has been overrated.
“The whole thing looks like a giant techno lava lamp,” wrote New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz of Anadol’s Unsupervised, a 24-foot screen that used AI to continuously generate images at the Museum of Modern Art from 2022 to 2023. Saltz found that the work is pointless and ordinary – good for entertaining you briefly but ultimately “doesn’t disturb anything inside you”. In short, he felt that the work had nothing to say.
Saltz argued that “if AI is to create meaningful art, it will have to provide its own vision and vocabulary”. On a literal level, this is exactly what Huyghe’s Idioms do. Watching them is strangely mesmerizing – as a viewer, it is interesting to face not a limited state of “artificial intelligence”, but a continuous process of “artificial learning”.
Here, Huyghe’s use of AI takes the art out of the artist’s control, which is exciting – not least because of the possibility that things could go wrong. The Idioms could fail to produce language or produce language that is incompatible and offensive to our ears. They could be overly influenced by noisy exhibition goers or rebels in some way, repeating the same words over and over.
It would undoubtedly be fascinating to return day after day and see how the Idioms have responded to the art around them. As Huyghe intended, these strange masked creatures provoke questions about the relationship between the human and the non-human (even if my first thought was, “I’m sure their knees are hurt from every kneeling”).
Less thought provoking is the use of AI in Camata’s work. Robotic legs surround a skeleton in one of the world’s driest deserts, performing a mysterious ritual. Although not live, the footage is edited in real time, with artificially intelligent “editors” collecting data from a large brass sensor similar to a telephone pole near the opening of the exhibit. This sensor monitors everything from the number of guests in the gallery to the weather outside, and the Camata footage is edited accordingly.
Yet curator Anne Stenne explains that this is not a simple case of “x” leading to “y” – for example, if there was only one person in the exhibition, it would not be the case that the editors AI automatically, say , select a movie shot at night. This means that while the endless editing process is fascinating – after all, you could sit there for the entire exhibition run and never see the same sequence twice – it’s hard to understand as a layman why AI is a necessary element. Would the work be any different if the editing was randomly generated? As a casual viewer, it is very difficult to know.
Indeed, those who attend these exhibitions have to trust that something extraordinary is happening behind the scenes. While Huyghe’s sensors can be seen throughout the exhibition, the artist is unwilling to share the details of the program that processes this information and how exactly it runs. A representative says, “Pierre does not want to focus on the technical parameters of his works. He wants to focus on the visitor experience.” This may upset audiences in a world where companies have been found to be using “pseudo-AI” that is actually run by hidden humans behind the scenes.
AI art works best when it does something the artist couldn’t do alone, as is the case with Huyghe’s self-generated language. Anything else risks feeling gimmicky at best and pointless at worst. Nevertheless, the AI trend will continue to sweep galleries, and very soon the tool will be common enough that it will be questioned as a pen or pencil.
In the 1960s, “computer art” swept the world, with exhibits from London to Stuttgart to Zagreb to Las Vegas. One contemporary writer said that “a computer may never produce a painting by itself”, and carefully noted that “at least one expert thinks that such art represents a truly new art form”. One day, discussions about the place of AI in art will undoubtedly sound this ancient.
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