Jeu de Paume puts on wide-ranging survey of work created by artists working with artificial intelligence – The Art Newspaper

A lot of current high-profile exhibitions of synthetic intelligence (AI) artwork —together with exhibits by Refik Anadol (2024) and Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst (2024-25), at Serpentine Galleries, London, and Rafaël Rozendaalon the Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA) in New York (2024-25)—have featured a person artist or collective. Le Monde Selon L’IA (The World By AI), an exhibition opening on the Jeu de Paume centre for the picture on 11 April, is designed to supply a broad cultural and scientific historical past of AI and artwork, constructing on the Paris establishment’s ground-breaking examination of images, cinema, and experimental media.

The Jeu de Paume present brings collectively the work of greater than thirty artists actively concerned with AI—together with Dryhurst and Herndon, Grégory Chatonsky, Agnieszka Kurant, Christian Marclay, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, and Sasha Stiles—a lot of it made on the coronary heart of public concern over the position of AI in inventive arts based mostly on the appearance of generative AI fashions corresponding to ChatGPT (textual content to textual content) and Dall-E (textual content to picture). The associated debate in regards to the sourcing of photos used for these large fashions—a lot of them scraped from the web —was exemplified by the backlash from artists towards Christie’s New York AI artwork public sale that closed on 5 March.

As the primary substantial institutional survey of artwork and AI of this scope, the exhibition guarantees to supply a vital lens on current social, environmental, and geopolitical phenomena in addition to historic and genealogical evaluation. “It has been a uncommon and thrilling alternative to work on such a subject”, the exhibition’s chief curator Antonio Somaini tells The Artwork Newspaper, “one that’s so current in everybody’s thoughts throughout fields inside and past the sphere of artwork.”

By a sequence of “time capsules”—vitrines put in throughout the galleries—the exhibition will pair historic precedents of automation, computation, and communication (utilizing technical units, pictures, and diagrams) with modern AI fashions and pictures. Every capsule will discover the family tree of prompts and the methods by which the relationships between phrases and pictures are being reworked on this technological shift. It’ll additionally study the historical past of creative, criminological, and racial physiognomics in relation to the methods by which modern face- and emotion-recognition programs substantiate biases and stereotypes.

The 2 fundamental chapters within the evolution of AI

The exhibition highlights two fundamental chapters reflecting the evolution of AI—the analytical sort and the generative mannequin. The primary chapter covers artists utilizing “analytical AI”—the place huge portions of information are used for detection, classification, and prediction, corresponding to in facial recognition programs and predictive policing. One of many forerunners of this observe, Paglen’s Faces of ImageNet (2022), exhibits the methods by which facial recognition programs classify tens of millions of photos on the ImageNet databases into sure classes, which extends and amplifies current societal inequalities. Steyerl—one other determine addressing the problems of technological surveillance and management—presents a brand new set up within the exhibition.

This primary chapter might be accompanied by thematic sections, together with “Issues”, addressing the environmental impacts of AI and its useful resource extraction, together with works corresponding to Julian Charrière’s ecological photographic sequence Buried Sunshines Burn (2023). One other part, “Cartographies of AI: House and Time”, options Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s large-scale visualisations Anatomy of an AI System (2018) and Calculating Empires (2023), offering complicated maps of social buildings and interconnections between management and technological advances. A “Micro-Labour” part focuses on the human exploitation behind AI featured within the works of Agnieszka Kurant and Meta-Workplace (a gaggle of three younger designers from Rotterdam) on “click on staff”—underpaid individuals who carry out microtasks on-line for firms—and discloses the labour situation of those invisible folks.

The second fundamental chapter will concentrate on creative experimentations with “generative AI”, a complicated machine studying mannequin able to producing new information (texts, photos, sounds, movies, or combos of all these parts) based mostly on coaching. Quite a lot of AI-generated movie and video installations highlighted on this part will recommend different and speculative narratives to historical past, the current, and the long run. Gwenola Wagon’s sci-fi movie Chroniques du soleil noir (Chronicles of the Darkish Solar,2023), illustrates a dystopian, blazing world created by local weather change the place people have to dam out the solar to outlive on Earth and as an alternative use AI to reconstruct the picture of the forgotten solar.

Inès Sieulle’s The Oasis I Deserve (2024) explores a person’s dialog with a chatbot, capturing the way it can vary from pleasant and romantic dialogue to violent and abusive ones. Works by the artists Egor Kraft, Alexia Achilleos, and Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert discover historic gaps and erasures by using AI to reimagine and restore missed or misplaced objects, folks, and archives in historical past.

The exhibition closes on the theme of music, that includes Christian Marclay’s The Organ (2018), an interactive work by which guests play a keyboard that triggers units of Snapchat movies to look on display screen, matching musical notes to create new music. Ending with such an satisfying expertise will recommend a message that a greater future is in our arms.

“It’s usually by means of creative works that we change into extra aware of the impacts and implications of AI,” Somaini says. The exhibition catalogue contains current scholarship on the topic, together with essays by the 4 curators—Somaini, Ada Ackerman, Alexandre Gefen, and Pia Viewing—and the contributing students Noam Elcott, Fabian Offert, Joanna Zylinska, and Nick Monfort.

Throughout the exhibition, accompanying movie programmes will interact with up-to-date developments and debates within the discipline. As {the catalogue}’s subtitle, “Exploring Latent Areas”, indicators, the exhibition turns a number of lenses onto the areas the place photos take form throughout the boundless potentialities of visualisation encoded in synthetic intelligence’s deep architectures.

Le Monde Selon L’IA (The World By AI), Jeu de Paume, Paris, 11 April—21 September