More Than Meets AI
Video Reel, Total run time, 0:49:32
Kunstgarasjen Black Box
This exhibition investigates AI and its role in creativity, narrative, and artistic innovation. We do so from a critically engaged perspective, one that both celebrates the new potentialities of AI for the arts and literature, while simultaneously considering some of the significant challenges AI poses for our culture and society. We also contextualize contemporary AI art within a wider context of generative digital art and electronic literature that has a history stretching back to the beginnings of the digital computer.
The works in this exhibition engage with AI in ways that challenge conventional notions of how artists and writers might respond to this tectonic shift in technology, considering for example the complexity of new forms of writing that manifest as visual art. How might we “read” a parody articulated through generated images? How will AI impact the future of motion pictures? How can AI be used to produce works that critique dominant power structures? How can artworks address the biases and inequities that are baked into AI platforms and perhaps embedded within human language itself? Here we explore the role of the cyborg author, the hybrid artist, whose work is neither solely the product of an individual human mind nor an artificial intelligence but a dance between the two within the vectors of a vast network of signification.
The collection of videos shown in Kunstgarasjen features works that demonstrate some of the different ways that visual artists and language artists encounter and work with contemporary generative AI. “Women Reclaiming AI” by Birgitte Aga and Coral Manton (2021) documents a series of workshops and a resulting voice assistant application. It substitutes the often-subservient gendered role represented with one of the empowered women exploring gender. “I Know What You’re Thinking” by Mario de la Ossa (2021) uses an early text-to-image generation platform to produce a reflection on political protests and how they are oppressed. “Posthuman Cinema” by Mark America, Will Luers, and Chad Mossholder (2023) is a ten-part film produced using generative AI that invokes avant-garde film styles of the 1960s-70s while meditating on the future of AI. “Republicans in Love” by Scott Rettberg (2023) is a work that investigates text-to-image generation as a type of writing, using prompts that explore the ironies and excesses of populist Trumpism. “Identity Upgrade” by Jhave (2023) is a series of short films that make use of AI-generated scripts and text-to-image generation to consider future trajectories for humanity and autonomous AI. “Creativity Machines” by Eamon O’Kane (2023) consists of images, based on classic psychological research into the creativity of architects, re-interpreted by AI. Alinta Krauth and Jason Nelson’s “Ultra Large Digital Narratives” (2023) uses the outpainting capabilities of a text-to-image generation platform combined with bespoke animations to create visual storyworlds. Talan Memmott’s “Introducing Lary: The San Biagio Frescoes of Pietro Golamuto” (2023) consists of generated images, animation, and voice that meditate on the artist’s throat cancer through the story of a fictional Renaissance saint of laryngectomies. Avital Meshi’s “Calling Myself Self” (2023) combines image generation, text animation and dance to interpolate and confound human self-perception. Eamon O’Kane’s “Image Tree Tests” (2023) animates the artist’s own tree drawings along with their AI-interpreted counterparts. Mario Santamaria and Alex Saum’s “Internet Tour: San Francisco Bay Area” (2023), with video by Dylan Reibling, documents a bus tour of contemporary IT infrastructure, highlighting how AI consumes massive amounts of energy and its fraught ecological consequences.
The More Than Meets AI exhibition, curated by Jhave Johnston, Eamon O’Kane, Jill Miller, Scott Rettberg, and Alex Saum, is taking place at multiple venues from late September to late November at venues including the Center for Digital Narrative, Kunstgarasjen, Joy Forum (KMD), Rom 61 (KMD), and the Bergen International Film Festival. It is arranged and sponsored by the Norwegian Research Council Project Extending Digital Narrative, the Peder Sather for Advanced Study, the faculties of Humanities and Art, Music, and Design at the University of Bergen, the University of California, Berkeley, and the host venues.
More Than Meets AI, Video Reel, Total run time, 0:49:32
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