Art and AI exhibition opens at MCA, featuring Kate Crawford and Christopher Kulendran Thomas
This work meant tracking down patents for two years, trying to understand how and where data is stored, how much energy is consumed, and much more.
“I spent time in mines, going to Amazon fulfillment plants, going to all the places where AI is being built, seeing semiconductor manufacturing, getting into all these components in the supply chain,” Crawford says.
Crawford and Joler’s intense and painstaking work aims to spark an informed discussion about artificial intelligence, which is spreading at such a dizzying pace that it may seem like a fait accompli.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas with his work The Finesse. Credit: Janie Barrett
“[There needs to be] It’s a democratic conversation that will allow people to have some say in the big decisions that are made at the infrastructure level, like thinking about data centers and the amount of energy and water used, all the way down to the cognitive layer, like our education, which is being radically transformed,” says Crawford.
“The creative industries are also being radically transformed. Is this what we wanted? Is it something you wanted? Did you want AI to write your songs and paint your pictures? [just] Do you do your laundry and pay your taxes? There are a number of questions about how we as a society will play a greater role in understanding and participating, because otherwise AI will be something that is done to us. Rather than something we participate in.
Crawford and Joler’s study Data Dreams: Art and Artificial IntelligenceAn exhibition opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art this weekend.
It joins eight other studies, each with a different take on what AI might mean. These include: FinenessAn engaging and immersive video installation by British-born Tamil artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas.
Growing up in London in the 1980s after his family moved there to escape the civil war in Sri Lanka, Thomas heard only snippets of the Tamil Tigers liberation movement from his parents.
“Since then I have come to find this history incredibly interesting,” he says. “This work is a way for me to kind of hallucinate the missing links in the things I heard growing up and fill in some of those gaps.”
Episodes of The Finesse are narrated by ‘an avatar bearing a striking resemblance to a well-known media personality’. Credit:
The study uses artificial intelligence to imagine a universe in which the Tamil Tigers won the fight in part.
“These alternative realities are like science fiction in that they are a way to take a look at these other possible worlds,” Thomas says.
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Portions of the work are “automatically edited” by artificial intelligence algorithms based on images taken live from social media and narrated by an image of Kim Kardashian or, as Thomas puts it, “an avatar bearing a striking resemblance to a well-known media personality.”
“I never know what you’re going to say, but often the most interesting and insightful things in this work are not the things I write, but the things that emerge each time.
“There’s all kinds of uncertainty about what you’re looking at, and that’s part of the fun of watching it.”
Data Dreams: Art and Artificial Intelligence like that at MCA Until April 27.
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