Artists Explore A.I., With Some Deep Unease

This article is part of our latest Artificial Intelligence special report, which focuses on how the technology continues to evolve and affect our lives.

Adjusting to technological developments is not a new concept for the art world.

Wood panels were once the standard for paintings, but by the 17th century they were largely overtaken by canvas, and the paint itself changed, too. Video art, a mainstay now, was a new phenomenon in the 1960s.

More recently, augmented reality and virtual reality have captured the imagination of artists as ways to tell stories that we could not have imagined even 20 years ago.

But the rise of artificial intelligence in art, a phenomenon in recent years, has a different cast to it. Not only is A.I. a tool for artists, who are employing machine intelligence in fascinating ways, it is also frequently a topic to be examined — sometimes in the same piece.

And underlying many of the works is a deep unease. As Lisa Phillips, the director of New York’s New Museum, put it, the worries come down to “the prospect that machines are going to take over.” She added, “What are we unleashing?”

Even the art market was alerted to a new realm when an A.I.-generated portrait that was initiated by the Paris-based art collective Obvious was sold for $432,500 at Christie’s in 2018. It was like a traditional portrait of a man, but his features were smudged and blurry.

Museums and other exhibition spaces have also produced a flurry of current and coming shows involving A.I. that were scheduled for this spring, some of them delayed after closings because of the coronavirus pandemic.

They include a survey of the subject, “Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI,” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco scheduled through Oct. 25; “Future Sketches,” which was on view earlier this year at Artechouse Washington and is intended to move to Artechouse’s Miami space later this year; Trevor Paglen’s photography at the Altman-Siegel Gallery in San Francisco; and “Ed Atkins: Get Life/Love’s Work” scheduled for the New Museum from June 24 to Sept. 27.

Mr. Paglen is one of the best-known artists in the A.I. territory. His work on it, and on the subject of state surveillance, helped him win a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (the “genius” grant) in 2017.

“I’ve been working on it for a while,” Mr. Paglen said.

“Once I started thinking about it, I haven’t stopped.” He is based in New York, where he has two of his three studios; the other is in Berlin.

His work at Altman-Siegel tries to connect the surveying of the American West in the 19th century with the way computers perceive the world via the data they are given — how what is officially “seen” creates power dynamics.

Mr. Paglen has a work in “Uncanny Valley,” too, called “They Took the Faces From the Accused and the Dead … (SD18),” a grid of 3,240 mug shots, used without the subjects’ consent, from the American National Standards Institute, a nonprofit group founded in 1918 that helps set agreed-upon standards across industries, including a wide array of tech fields.

The images were used to train facial-recognition programs, and Mr. Paglen uses them to question “how is data weaponized,” he said.

The for-profit exhibition space Artechouse, with branches in New York, Washington and Miami, focuses exclusively on the nexus of art and tech, as its name suggests.

“We thought it was a niche that needed to be filled,” said the co-founder Tati Pastukhova. Since its founding in 2017, about half of its shows have touched on A.I. in some way.

The latest such exhibition, “Future Sketches,” is a collaboration with Zach Lieberman, an artist who is also an adjunct associate professor at M.I.T.’s Media Lab (his university bio also calls him a “hacker”).

Perhaps befitting a full-time techie, his work has a more positive spin than that of some others working with A.I. His Artechouse piece “Expression Mirror,” originally created for the 2018 London Design Biennale, reads the facial expressions of a user, tracking muscle movements at 68 points on the face.

But when people look at the “mirror,” they do not see themselves. “Your face is replaced with someone’s face who has used it before,” Mr. Lieberman said. “It matches your expressions, like a smile or frown, and it learns as it interacts.” He calls this a “face action coding system,” a version of a “fingerprint.”

Mr. Lieberman said he understood why some artists plumbed the dark side of A.I., because of its long-term implications and because anything to do with machines could unsettle.

“It’s this black box that you feed things into,” he said. “It’s inscrutable in some way.”

But Mr. Lieberman said he encouraged a diversity of views on matters technological. “I think it’s important to create artworks for the public to have all kinds of conversations — be they critical or playful or anything else.”

Artechouse’s other founder, Sandro Kereselidze, struck a similar note.

“Everything in the world has a positive and negative side,” he said, adding that “it’s in our power” to explore both sides of A.I.

“As long as we can find the off button on the computer.”

source: nytimes.com