Creative Machine - TAM

CHINA 2024-25

Creative Machine is a large-scale international exhibition that focuses on artificial intelligence, robotics, computer art, and creativity. It aims to explore the boundary between human and machine creativity. Observing AI and digital art creation from a global perspective, the exhibition features selected works from 30 artists/collectives worldwide, spanning diverse fields such as AI, generative art, robotics, and virtual reality. The exhibition is jointly curated by Tang Xin, Artistic Director of the Taikang Art Museum; William Latham, Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a pioneer in digital art who leads the "Creative Machine" project; and senior curator Zhou Yi. Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie, an AI scientist, is the academic chair and moderator, with artist Han Yajuan serving as exhibition consultant.

The exhibition is divided into three distinct narrative sections: "History", "Education", and "Contemporary." The "History" section showcases the works of pioneering figures in art and technology from the 1950s to the late 1990s. Featured artists include John Whitney, the "Father of Computer Graphics"; Vera Molnar, the "Mother of Computer Art"; Benoit Mandelbrot, the "Father of Fractal Geometry"; Harold Cohen, creator of AARON, one of the earliest AI art systems; and Craig Reynolds, a trailblazer in 3D animation for film. During the past sixty years, these visionaries ignited the spark that fused modern technology and art. The "Contemporary" section showcases robotic art, interactive AI, computer vision art, and generative art through large-scale projections and installations by renowned international and Chinese artists. This section represents the cutting edge of AI-driven artistic practices, offering an exploration of a future world that is close at hand for all of us. The "Education" section provides introductory background information on the history and technologies involved in digital art for audiences new to the field. It offers foundational knowledge for those embarking on a journey into the AI era, while also delivering in-depth content on generative art and algorithmic design for viewers with prior knowledge in related areas.

Continuing Taikang Art Museum's exploration of the theme of "media", this exhibition examines the impact of emerging technologies on art as a starting point. While showcasing the forefront of AI art, it also offers a media archaeology perspective that weaves together a condensed history of digital art's evolution. The question "Can AI art be as creative as humans?" is examined through the journeys and iconic works of digital art pioneers from different eras, immersing audiences in the contemporary scene of AI art. With 30 artists / collectives represented, each of them becomes a "firestealer" of sorts, spanning 60 years of history, passing the "torch" of creative inspiration in AI art across time to Taikang Art Museum. Through an experience designed to engage audiences of all ages, the exhibition encourages viewers to reflect on the trajectory and future of human progress from a fresh perspective.

Introductions from the curators and academic chair :

  • Essay on Co-curating the Creative Machine at the Taikang Art Museum, Beijing (2024)

    Text by William Latham and Miriam Frendo

    Over the last two to three years, AI has opened up all sorts of opportunities for humankind and has become one of the most hotly debated topics, constantly making the headlines in mass media of all types across the globe. Within this space, the questions of human / machine creativity are central ones, both driving the enormous progress we are witnessing in so many areas from science and technology to mass communication and at the same time raising many deep questions such as does AI represent a fertile new terrain to be explored or does it spell the beginning of the end for the human artist? Will the artist be replaced by a machine?

    The Creative Machine was set up to explore thetwilight zone of human/machine creativity; and from its humble origins, has grown into a global art project in the past ten years. With the most recent collaboration in 2023, held with The University of Oxford, where the exhibition was accompanied by a symposium that spanned many academic disciplines, including AI and biology and also AI and medicine and neuroscience.

    Since 2014 there has been a huge cultural shift and an explosion of interest in AI. Furthermore, we are excited about the synergies that will undoubtedly emerge from bringing western and Chinese artists together and exploring how the relationship between art and technology is viewed and experienced in China by artists and the general public.

    My curation work on the exhibition has been in close collaboration with TAM Art Director Tang Xin and leading contemporary curator Zhou Yi, supported by the acclaimed painter and artist, Han Yajuan and with my long standing colleague at Goldsmiths (the University of London) Prof Frederic Fol Leymarie providing expert AI and Machine Leading academic guidance (he is also a world leading expert in Robot Creative Drawing). My curatorial work was closely supported by LinLin Wang from Tongji University and Tina Wu from Tsinghua University, PhD Students on international placement at Goldsmiths.

    The exhibition showcases artworks by 30 artists operating in diverse fields such as artificial intelligence, generative art, robotics, and virtual reality. The exhibition consists of three major sections: Historical, Contemporary, and Education. The Historical section features pioneers and famous artists from the 1950’s to the late 80s, while the Contemporary section presents large-scale installations and represents the forefront of contemporary AI-driven art practice with works by well-known international and Chinese artists encompassing robotic art, Interactive AI and Computer Vision Art and large scale projections of generative art. The Education section provides an overview, which will be especially helpful to those new to the subject, explaining the history and technology involved but also, through its focus on generative art and algorithmic design, contains plenty of rich content for visitors with more advanced knowledge of computing and the ideas.

    Although we showed a few of works from the early pioneers at the Creative Machine in Oxford in 2023, this is the first time we’ve had a dedicated historical section providing a comprehensive and coherent overview and it’s also the first time we’ve had an Education Section. As an educator and Professor myself, I’m very enthusiastic about this, as is co-curator and Art Director Tang Xin.

    The Historical Section traces the evolution of computer art, offering a comprehensive view of its historical development. It features seminal works by early pioneers such as Frieder Nake, Vera Molnar, Desmond Paul Henry, Herbert W. Franke, David Em, Harold Cohen, Paul Brown, Manfred Mohr and Ernest Edmonds, highlighting their groundbreaking explorations in merging intelligent algorithms with artistic creativity. It is a privilege to be able to house so many of the distinguished pioneers under one roof.

    From the 1950s, our earliest pioneer is Heinrich Heidersberger who, without working with an actual computer, was already creating patterns generated by a mechanical device and whose work can therefore be considered a precursor to computer art as such. Moving forward a bit, the artists of the 1960s all used actual computers, albeit with many limitations compared with the devices we are familiar with today. Vera Molnar’s rule-based geometric abstractions were first created by hand using a predetermined set of mathematical rules. By contrast with the more recent artists in our Contemporary section and the artists in the Education Section (primarily working from the seventies onwards), whose code is complex and not accessible to the general public, Molnar and the other artists of her generation used simple rules to generate complexity.

    Jumping forward to the 1980’s and 1990’s, although many of the later artists shared the preoccupations of the first-generation pioneers, such as introducing chance into their work. The British artist, Harold Cohen developed AARON, first conceived in 1973, one of the first and most complex software programs for computer-generated art. Another striking development in the 1980s was the replacement of the Benson plotters and dot matrix machines that had been used to create drawings by new and highly sophisticated ‘rendering’ systems with a range of 3D surface qualities that made it possible to produce full-coloured images with light and shade on a screen, allowing highly sophisticated images to be achieved with far greater levels of three-dimensionality.

    From my own work in The Historical section, we’ve included, Oval Etching (FormSynth) 1985, is one of my early rule-based works, completed when I was 23 and still a student and is the only entirely hand-drawn work in the Creative Machine Exhibition. It shows a single tiny sphere in the centre evolving into complex organic structures through incremental sculptural steps using the FormSynth grammar I had created for my Organic Art which was to become the foundation of my later art at IBM.

    Finally, we have a fantastic line-up of contemporary artists. In making our selection, we chose works that are all technologically highly innovative. These works represent work at the forefront of contemporary AI exploration in art creation, demonstrating how intelligent technology-driven creative processes can challenge and redefine the boundaries of traditional art.

    The participating artists employ an array of AI techniques and innovative technological approaches, such as machine learning, Artificial Neural Networks,Deep learning、cellular growth simulations, organic structure mutations, and automated aesthetic selection, allowing them to explore uncharted territories in creative expression.

    Memo Akten has been a regular exhibitor in the Creative Machine Exhibition since its inception in 2014 and his work continues to surprise and excite audiences around the world, with the work on show in the exhibition being most recently exhibited in Venice Biennale 2024. Felix Luque Sanchez and Patrick Tresset are both groundbreaking artists coming under the heading of Robotics. We are also delighted to be showing - for the first time internationally - the Canonical Portrait Series created by neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist Pareshkev Nachev.

    After her early and highly successful career as a painter well, Yajuan Han is now showing her videos, VR work animations and games internationally to great acclaim. We are showing three of her recent works.

    The exhibition also features Maxim Zhestkov, well known for his generative video art. For the film we will show at The Creative Machine, Zhestkov uses algorithms and graphical physics simulations. The other outstanding Chinese artists’ works including Liu Jiayus Waves of Code which turns gallery space becomes a portal between the virtual and real worlds, prompting us to rethink our position within it, and Chando Aos Im a Fish builds a complex and open system, conjunction with the robots, flora and fauna, software, food, machinery etc.

    Finally, I am pleased to show for the first time my own most recent work: Human Mutator Kinect with Interactive Real Time Interaction, created in partnership with my long term collaborator Stephen Todd. it involves the gallery visitors as participants in the creative process. Here we are using the Kinect Azure system with AI physics technology and computer vision to spawn 3D forms generated by our Mutator/FormGrow Alife/AI system using the person’s body as the generator. It is quite a humorous work, referencing the Italian Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who produced portraits entirely made up of fruit, vegetables, branches and other objects. It is also my first Mutator work with a figurative dimension, as the viewer’s body and movements generate evolutionary forms clustered into human body derived organic shapes.

    In The Creative Machine Beijing Exhibition our aim is to bring together leading international AI Art / Generative Art / robot artists and Chinese Artists working in the same domain at Taikang Art Museum to form a major public exhibition but also be a forum for conversation and debate aided by the content and ideas in the Educational and Historical sections in the exhibition.

    We very much hope you enjoy the Creative Machine Exhibition and big thanks to Taikang Art Museum for a fantastic collaboration.

  • Revisiting Six Decades of Creative Spark: AI in the Digital Visual Arts

    Curatorial Essay by Tang Xin


    The Curatorial Impetus 

    Taikang Art Museum’s research revolves around three central focuses: the artistic media, institutional structure, and art ecology, the former being the vehicle driving our exploration into creative practices. As technology advances into the AI era, the transformation of artistic media promises an unprecedented and monumental shift in human history. Naturally, exploring how new technology develops and intersects with art has become a prime approach to understanding the future of art. This approach has inspired my collaboration in curating this exhibition on art and technology. Specifically, the conversation around AI’s creative potential and how it might integrate with the artist’s creativity in the future is essential. When AI acts as more than a tool, has it become a creative partner? And how do we interpret the collaborative creativity between humans and AI? Such questions compel us to revisit the classic yet ultimate questions: What is human creativity? What is art? Perhaps it’s necessary to reframe these inquiries through the lens of AI and technological advancement.

    During the pandemic, I began listening to podcasts on technology and became increasingly mesmerized by Silicon Valley’s stories. The transformative power of technology is not only swift but often unimaginable, making our current way of life seem almost outdated by comparison. The future of human-machine interactions is inevitably approaching from all directions we are unaware of. Children who live the “traditional” way of life will become the first generation to face these future challenges—shouldn’t we encourage them to be more perceptive of the changes underway?

    What will human society look like in the AI era? AI is undoubtedly the most widely discussed topic this year, and the future of human-machine relationships is now a matter of deep concern. Compared to the pre-digital age, the emerging human-machine-object ecosystem presents new living conditions and challenges. While we may not yet know how to prepare for the future, revisiting the history of AI could offer insights into the transition from past to present, prompting some forward-thinking, especially for the younger generations. In January 2023, I was fortunate to meet William Latham and thrilled to discover the long-standing, pioneering discussions at Creative Machine, which brings together decades of creative exploration by countless artists and scientists. My initial thought in our curatorial discussion was to showcase 60 years of AI practices in the visual field. I wanted young people to travel back in time, and through this exhibition, tracing sixty years of AI’s history of intersecting with art within the evolution of programming—a vital entry point for understanding early human-machine interaction.

    The origins of human-machine interaction span multiple fields, with the visual domain dating back to the 1960s. Western scientists and artists began employing computer technology in visual art creation during that era, whose classic artworks have become milestones on this interactive journey. This exhibition revisits their achievements over the past six decades, from computer art and robotics to artificial intelligence, employing hardware and software alike. Artistic practice exhibits a profound interdisciplinary nature, where artists have always collaborated with scientists in math, neuroscience, biology, and psychology and adopted new technical means, including machine learning, cellular growth simulation, fuzzy logic, organic structure mutation, and automated aesthetic selection. Progressing from rudimentary to complex steps, these pioneers visualized the unknown and expanded the spectator's perceptions, experiences, and imaginations. Through these 30 artists’ works presented in this exhibition, we hope visitors will grasp the concerns and questions raised by artists in their respective while gaining a broad overview of six decades of AI’s creative journey in visual arts.
    The evolution history of human-machine/technology interactions has strung together our predecessors’ explorations, with each footprint resembling a “black box” waiting to be opened. This exhibition serves as an archaeological journey through six decades of integrating technology into artistic practice, allowing us to examine how AI’s creativity has advanced to the present, one that aims to inspire spectators to re-envision human development and the future from a fresh perspective.


    Art as the Interface Between the Physical and Virtual Worlds

    In other words, humanity is itself a perfect intelligent machine, embodying mechanical and creative attributes. Its mechanical aspect is a potent part of human genes. It is synonymous with human biology's recessive and dominant genes, gradually revealing immense energy that has propelled the progress from craftmanship to industrialization. By using tools and developing industry, humans have continued to unlock their mechanical nature, building machines that essentially mimic themselves. Each technological advancement enhances this self-replicating ability, allowing machines to become more sophisticated, increasingly capable of interacting with humans, and ultimately gearing toward human-like intelligence.

    Throughout history, humans have considered themselves the inventors of machines, relegating machines to passive and subordinate positions. However, machines have gradually assumed a more central role without human awareness. Imagine the development of machines, from basic forms to their current sophistication, may have accrued a commanding role, driving humans to follow their developmental needs, accumulating the means of production, and maximizing the distribution of the product, which led to the seemingly market growth and expansion. Machines constantly demand humans to pursue technological progress to increase productivity, fueling industrial revolutions and globalization. In this process, humans believe and accept such a trend and have adopted it as a shared developmental direction. While machines have introduced convenience, they have also entered and occupied a larger portion of human life, a trend that will likely grow in the future, with humans’ share of space shrinking accordingly. It is not a coincidence that global birth rates are declining.

    If we adopt a future technological perspective, considering humanity’s mechanical traits, could we reinterpret what art truly is? In this sense, perhaps art has always been a form of simulacrum (a virtual presentation), and the history of art may be conceived as a history of simulacrum and its technologies. Before the Renaissance, simulacra were primarily presented as two-dimensional. As the techniques of simulacrum advanced during the Renaissance, it enabled three-dimensional representations of physical objects. The invention of photography and Impressionism marked a break from handmade simulations, inaugurating the mechanical era of visual production. Impressionism changed the long-standing habit of mimetic visual presentations based on images of the physical world, objectively expanding the receptive human viewing experience. Aren’t the works of Cézanne, Picasso, Mondrian, and later, abstraction, mark the process of a quiet evolution of mimesis to production with mechanical and digital features? With this process in mind, simulacrum has become the interface between today's online virtual world and our physical reality. As humans traverse these two worlds through a shifting gaze, they have become accustomed to all features of the mediated present. The previous examples drawn from classical art history may only be the rational clue of the simulacra production of the manual era. After entering the era of mechanical output, mimetic production formed an alternative thread of technology-empowered art, starting from photography, video, and film, and later on, the intervention of computers. This exhibition presents the thread of artistic production powered by technology after the intervention of computers.

    This exhibition presents a significant shift when computers become integral to simulacrum production, transforming the creation process into an interactive collaboration between artist and machine. This unprecedented interaction marks a revolutionary change in art creation and production. We are convinced that the ancient “art” will still exist in the age of AI. Why so, and What does it imply?

    I am not anxious about whether humans or machines will dominate or replace one another because achieving a balance between humans and machines would ensure our coexistence. Human-machine-object coexistence has become an unstoppable future trend, and their balancing process is of even greater concern. Changes in machine interaction capabilities have led to iterations in human-machine relationships, which have become increasingly more noticeable over the past few years. Moreover, broader and more intimate interaction capabilities will inevitably affect future human existence as they transform their relationships with humans. Yet, are humans well prepared for this? The exhibition provides a single historical perspective: from the aspect of art creation, the coexistence of human-machine interaction is now a reality. 

  • Curator’s Essay by Zhou Yi

    Curated by the two members of the Creative Machine group—artist and professor William Latham from Goldsmiths, University of London, and AI scientist and professor Frederic Fol Leymarie—in collaboration with the Taikang Art Museum, “Creative Machine: Evolution of AI Sparks Across Six Decades” provides a phased exploration of the development of computer art in the West, from its beginnings to the AI era.

    When I first encountered materials from this exhibition, I had an intriguing intuition: the pioneers of computer art in the 1960s were some of the avant-garde artists of the time. They incorporated logic and generative processes into art, in parallel with, if not ahead of, the conceptual art movement. Like conceptual art, their work centered on shared languages and extended from human language to machine language. Given that computer technology at the time had yet to be widely accessible, these early creators were often researchers who had both artistic and scientific expertise.

    By the 1990s, the spread of personal computers and the internet enabled real interaction between creators and audiences, even to the point of role reversal. In today’s AI era, the surge in artistic production is no longer radical, elitist, or marginal; rather, it gravitates toward realism, beauty, wonder, joy, and lyricism—of the traditional aesthetic values—meeting audiences’ expectations of art while fueling curiosity about AI. The trajectory of computer art development seems to mirror the broader trends in art history. Since its inception, the dual timelines of the real and virtual worlds have extended toward the present and the past, respectively. The evolution of computer-based art seems to follow a reverse path, reaching back to a pre-modern, even mythical, past. Rather than demystifying the technical processes of art, AI may paradoxically enhance them.

    Such intuition, or perhaps illusion, is independent of value judgments. Even if computer art is indeed on a regressive path, it already unfolds on a higher dimensional plane. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, William Latham and Frederic Fol Leymarie have in recent years organized several forums involving artists and scientists from fields like neuroscience, bioinformatics, mathematics, biology, and psychology. One of the key public topics these forums have explored is creativity: Does AI truly possess creativity? Are today’s software technologies merely illusions of creativity? Should AI systems imitate humans or evolve in ways entirely distinct from us? Could AI’s creativity eventually surpass human creativity, and how should we measure or compare it? Answering these questions requires a fusion of artistic and cutting-edge scientific knowledge, and even our current understanding in both fields is insufficient for definitive answers.

    Can the emotions generated by machines move us as profoundly as great art? Although AI cannot yet independently discover creative subjects, in collaboration with human artists, as demonstrated by numerous works in this exhibition, it has performed a superior ability to evoke emotional resonance more directly than traditional mediums. If someone today were to create entirely new art using AI, it would surpass in significance any artworks humanity had produced, because this new creation would unlock the very code of creativity, unveiling the mystery of creative power—an achievement beyond human comprehension. Every contemporary work in this exhibition, aside from addressing its specific subject, consciously asks: What is art creation? What is consciousness? While such questions are typically outside the general scope of artistic inquiry, they form a unifying theme among this exhibition’s artworks. These artistic endeavors reach toward the subject of creativity, attempting to reveal, even if pretend to, the ultimate secrets of art. In the realm of AI-assisted art, the process of art creation itself becomes the very content expressed by the artwork.

Academic essay by Chair & Moderator, Frederic Fol Leymarie (PDF)

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