ART & TECHNOLOGY

Art Acumen’s curator writes for ART TACTIC 

 Art Tactic is a leading publication for art market research & analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) is easily one of the most defining and disruptive advancements of our generation with no signs of slowing down. While the modern concept of AI dates back to the 1950s, its technological advancement and growth in the past five to ten years has been unprecedented. Machines are now able to generate highly realistic images, video and text to such an extent as to challenge human creativity on a whole new level. The art world in particular is experiencing these effects through the proliferation and popularization of digital artworks created with the use of machine learning.

One of the first inroads into the field of art and technology stems from an area of machine experimentation referred to as computational creativity. In the 1960s, Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer alongside artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman formed a collective called The Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), which applied creative uses of computers. Today with the exponential growth of technology, a number of leading  artists of generative art including Anna Ridler, Jake Elwes and Mario Klingemann, are utilizing machine learning to create what is referred to as AI or generative art. These artists often use a type of algorithm called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) which trains on a dataset of tens and thousands of images that can generate increasingly lifelike images and alter existing ones. Popular exhibitions including the “AI: More than Human” at the Barbican Centre last summer and the highly publicized $432,500 sale of the Portrait of Edmond Belamy at Christie’s in 2018 have spawn a newfound interest and hype around machine-made art. Many of these exhibitions and artworks, however, often take advantage of AI as a tech buzzword rather than a creative medium…….cont.

The full analysis by Devon can be found with Art Tactic 

Featured image: We Are All Made of Light by Maja Petric
We Are All Made of Light is the first iteration of an immersive art installation about our interconnectedness. The installation utilizes interactive light, spatial sound and artificial intelligence (AI) to create audiovisual trails of every person’s presence in the exhibiting space, meshing it with trails of other visitors from the past, present, and connecting them with future visitors.