Michal Luria – Looking Outwards – 08

Kyle McDonald

The artist I will present for this weekly assignment is Kyle McDonald. McDonald works on the intersection between artificial intelligence and art, and creates tools to allow artists to apply machine learning to their work. He is a professor at NYU ITP and a artist in residence at CMU.

What I like about his work is that McDonald focuses on understanding artificial intelligence, and does this by placing it in contrast to human intelligence, asking questions about its meaning, how is it different from human intelligence, and where it might lead to in the future.

Some of the interesting aspects Kyle explores in his work are the biases AI currently has, for example, by asking “who isn’t in the training data?”, as well as looking at patterns of AI and playing around with what various data sets can result in.

McDonald’s work combines exploration of AI – what is it capable of doing and how can you leverage it to create art, along with thoughts on the results, problems and philosophical questions this developing technology creates.

Kyle McDonald talking about AI in his talk “Weird Intelligence”, as part of the Eyeo annual conference. source.