Two people dressed in black are kneeling on the floor, so still that they must surely be in pain. If they are grimacing, there would be no way to know - their features are obscured by oversized, smooth gold masks, as though they have buried their faces in half an Easter egg.
Their stillness makes them seem like sculptures, and only by checking for the subtle rise and fall of their chests can you confirm they are indeed human. Which is fitting - because they aren't actually human, at least not totally. They're human-machine hybrids, "Idioms", created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his exhibition, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.
Idioms are wandering the exhibition for its run between March and November. Sensors in their masks monitor the rooms they sit in and visitors they encounter, and artificial intelligence will gradually convert this information into a brand new language-building a dictionary until they will even be able to communicate with one another. Every day, their knowledge will accumulate; Huyghe wonders what they might be able to say in 20 years' time.
Shortly before the exhibition opens to the public, two Idioms kneel in a darkened room opposite a large black box suspended from the ceilingthis is a "self-generating instrument", producing ambient music and crisscrossing beams of light. In response to the artwork in front of them, the Idioms appear to have only generated a few syllables, repeated as the LED screens on their foreheads glow gold.
Their words are a hissing whisper. It sounds a lot like: "What's this?" It's a fair question to ask. The dilemma facing any artist who tries to tackle a subject as paradigm-changing and era-defining as artificial intelligence is that the real magic is often happening on some hard drives behind the scenes.
While there is a blinking server on show at Liminal, Huyghe conceded that it might be hard for a casual visitor to understand that the language coming from the Idioms' masks is Al-generated.
Like Huyghe, creatives from German filmmaker Hito Steyerl to British conceptualist Gillian Wearing have used AI to make or enhance their art. Shortly after Liminal's first run closes, an ostensibly "fully Al-driven" multimedia exhibition of French artist Philippe Parreno's historical works will open at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
AI is already all around us, autocompleting our emails, suggesting a new show to watch on Netflix. Chatbots have revolutionised writing - responding to prompts to write cover letters, code, plays and poems - while text-to-image models such as DALL.E and Midjourney allow anyone to create "art" by typing in a few words.
But as the technology becomes more prominent, artists' use of AI risks feeling trite. Crowds have allegedly been "transfixed for an hour or more" by Turkish artist Refik Anadol's "live paintings" currently being displayed at the Serpentine Gallery in London. AI was fed imagery of rainforests and coral reefs to generate Anadol's exhibition, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive.
However, critics have said that Anadol's previous Al-generated work is over-hyped.
"The whole thing looks like a massive techno lava lamp," New York Magazine's Jerry Saltz wrote of Anadol's Unsupervised, a 7-metre screen that used AI to continuously generate images at the Museum of Modern Art between 2022 and 2023. Saltz found the work to be pointless and mediocre - good at entertaining you briefly but ultimately "not disturbing anything inside you".
Watching Huyghe's...
Their stillness makes them seem like sculptures, and only by checking for the subtle rise and fall of their chests can you confirm they are indeed human. Which is fitting - because they aren't actually human, at least not totally. They're human-machine hybrids, "Idioms", created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his exhibition, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.
Idioms are wandering the exhibition for its run between March and November. Sensors in their masks monitor the rooms they sit in and visitors they encounter, and artificial intelligence will gradually convert this information into a brand new language-building a dictionary until they will even be able to communicate with one another. Every day, their knowledge will accumulate; Huyghe wonders what they might be able to say in 20 years' time.
Shortly before the exhibition opens to the public, two Idioms kneel in a darkened room opposite a large black box suspended from the ceilingthis is a "self-generating instrument", producing ambient music and crisscrossing beams of light. In response to the artwork in front of them, the Idioms appear to have only generated a few syllables, repeated as the LED screens on their foreheads glow gold.
Their words are a hissing whisper. It sounds a lot like: "What's this?" It's a fair question to ask. The dilemma facing any artist who tries to tackle a subject as paradigm-changing and era-defining as artificial intelligence is that the real magic is often happening on some hard drives behind the scenes.
While there is a blinking server on show at Liminal, Huyghe conceded that it might be hard for a casual visitor to understand that the language coming from the Idioms' masks is Al-generated.
Like Huyghe, creatives from German filmmaker Hito Steyerl to British conceptualist Gillian Wearing have used AI to make or enhance their art. Shortly after Liminal's first run closes, an ostensibly "fully Al-driven" multimedia exhibition of French artist Philippe Parreno's historical works will open at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
AI is already all around us, autocompleting our emails, suggesting a new show to watch on Netflix. Chatbots have revolutionised writing - responding to prompts to write cover letters, code, plays and poems - while text-to-image models such as DALL.E and Midjourney allow anyone to create "art" by typing in a few words.
But as the technology becomes more prominent, artists' use of AI risks feeling trite. Crowds have allegedly been "transfixed for an hour or more" by Turkish artist Refik Anadol's "live paintings" currently being displayed at the Serpentine Gallery in London. AI was fed imagery of rainforests and coral reefs to generate Anadol's exhibition, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive.
However, critics have said that Anadol's previous Al-generated work is over-hyped.
"The whole thing looks like a massive techno lava lamp," New York Magazine's Jerry Saltz wrote of Anadol's Unsupervised, a 7-metre screen that used AI to continuously generate images at the Museum of Modern Art between 2022 and 2023. Saltz found the work to be pointless and mediocre - good at entertaining you briefly but ultimately "not disturbing anything inside you".
Watching Huyghe's...
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The Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 19, 2024