Artists

Creative Machine Symposium Exhibition :
An Interrogation of AI Creativity 

AI art is a journey of artistic expression and technological exploration combined. Artists working with artificial intelligence (AI) are simultaneously pushing the boundaries of AI creativity and interrogating the technologies of AI itself.  

The new generation of AI art is created by deep learning methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to generate images through the input of data and implementation of training sets, through which AI systems can feasibly transcend human capacity in terms of scale and productivity, such as Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model which can be trained on millions of images in a short period of time to produce an aesthetically pleasing artefact, despite the cost of the bypassing of human context and critical positioning through the AI generative process. Traditionally an artwork is created within a wider socio-political, cultural, or theoretical context, and the artist’s situation, critical engagement or emotional response contribute to the meaning, and ultimately public reading of the final work itself. AI art is often cast as reductive as it is constrained to omit these dimensions when relying solely on algorithms and data to produce images. 

The Cognitive Scientist Margret Boden categorizes three types of AI creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational, which referred to analogical ideas, novel ideas from a predefined conceptual system and unexpected ideas from a transformational new structure, respectively. 

Boden believes the present models of AI creativity largely focus on exploratory. The reason that AI creativity has not yet reached the transformational stage is perhaps due to the limits of the current technology, such as the difficulty of automating evaluation. (1)

However, the scope of Human-Machine collaboration moves beyond these categorisations to critically examine AI art from the perspective of creative agency.  Even if the AI system itself could evaluate the new construction of a system, and hence demonstrate its transformational creativity when human subjectivity is partially moved away in favour of the AI system itself, two questions emerge: Is the AI intelligent enough to embody artistic creative vision and desire to express? Where do artists position their agency when collaborating with the logics of the machine language?

This reflection on the creative agency debate, may fundamentally change our perception of the way in which art is defined, produced, consumed, and distributed. Cultural policy scholar Hye-Kyung Lee maintains that AI art democratises artistic practice  from an economic and technological perspective thanks to the convenience and democratization of AI technologies, but at the same time dehumanizes our understanding of AI creativity when, as she puts it, “AI dissociates creativity from human agency”. (2) This democratisation of access and popular use of AI technologies in the production of images and artworks forms the backdrop for the related debate around how artists can now define their work amongst a growing plethora of AI produced creative content which circulates throughout the digital commons.

This exhibition presents artworks of twelve artists and collectives including Andy Lomas, Anna Ridler, Ao Lei, Entangled Others Studio, Daniel Berio, Jake Elwes, Libby Heaney, Memo Akten, Nye Thompson & Ubermorgen (2020) , Terence Broad, Yajuan Han, Lance Putnam and Team Mutator: William Latham, Stephen Todd and Peter Todd, who explore these tensions in current AI creativity milieu from different perspectives.

Na An , Lead Curator. 

1. Margaret Boden: Artificial Intelligence Volume 103, Issue1-2, August 1998, Pages 347-356
2. Hye-Kyung Lee: Media, culture & society, 2022, Vol.44 (3), p.601-612

LGO1
12:00 — 12:15 / Memo Atken & Libby Heany
15:45 — 15:55 / Jake Elwes
17:05 — 17:20 / Yajuan Han & Nye Thompson

19:00 / Full reel continues throughout night.

Atrium Space
1. Anna Ridler, Mosaic virus
2. Terence Broad,  (un)stable equilibrium
3. Entangled Others, Sediment Nodes
4. Alexandra Reben AI, text based GTP3 paintings
5. Andy Lomas Sensitivity and Stimulation
6. Daniel Berio, Graffitizer 2
7. Mutator team (William Latham, Stephen Todd & Peter Todd). MutatorKinect Physics. 2020-2022
8. Ao Lei, Radium 镭
9. Flo Yuting Zhu, I wont pack lightly for my trip to Mars
10. Max Jala p.AI.N 2022

* throughout day and night

LG02
18:45 / Harmonic Infinity (Lance Putnam and William Latham) to show through out the night and during lunch break.

Exhibition Screenings

Meet the Curators