Author: Leo

In Women in Media Arts: Does AI think like a (white) man?, Grubauer presents the view of Ars Electronica on AI for the purpose of supporting their project, which is to create “a comprehensive database devoted specifically to women in media art.” They did this to help give girls and women role models in terms of media art by increasing the presence of women artists in the public consciousness. Such projects play an important role in countering as hegemonic a phenomenon as patriarchy in the western world, which has shown through feminist philosophy and sociological research, that patriarchal (and white) tendencies permeate the cultural logic or societal common sense to the point of influencing objectivist science. “More and more activists point out the problematic prejudices and distortions of supposedly objective [my italics] algorithms. This has not only to do with the low proportion of female programmers and women in the IT sector in general, but above all with the biased data sets.” The mention of Mary Flanagan in this article aptly points out that this is a structural problem of society that creates the permeation I mention; it would be absurd to say an algorithm is inherently sexist or racist, and this claim is likely apprehended by confused defendants of the activists who push for making AI more equitable. The rest of the article introduces other women in the field of media art and their work such as Buolamwini/Gebru on skin color recognition, Aga/Manton on women-empowering AI, and Sinders’ feminist data set.

All quotes are from the article linked below.

https://ars.electronica.art/aeblog/en/2020/04/10/women-in-media-arts-ai/

Tabita Rezaire

Rezaire is a socially-conscious and anti-colonialist artist working in moving image and performative, experimental art. She attained a master’s degree from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design for her art practice and can be seen today composing thought-provoking performance pieces, jarring videos, and visceral net design. You need not look further than her website (https://www.tabitarezaire.com/offering) to get a strong idea of what she does. I admire her work because it has this absurdity in aesthetics (reminds be of Jacolby Satterwhite’s work) through purposely messy, dated graphic and net design mixed with straight-forward, but just as weird, language like “anti capitalist bae chasing the money,” “colorism kills,” and “pimp your brain” in her self portrait series INNER FIRE. This aesthetic culminates in a maximalist, sensory overload that forces the audience to at least interact with something that is present in her work. By doing so, audiences need to think about the countless junctures of social commentary Rezaire is expressing about. From beauty standards to the intra-capitalist rebellion necessary for marginalized groups in the hypercapitalist US state to the other-worldly, outer-space motifs that assert a futurism as a form of anti-colonialist rebellion (reminds me of similar aesthetic utilizations by music artist Sun Ra in his imagining of other worlds when colonialist oppression very apparently and concretely has taken that of black, brown, and Asian countries all around the world), her mission is both clear and effectively communicated through the clear desire of confrontation of the audience.

Kawandeep Virdee

Kawandeep Virdee is the co-founder of New American Public Art, an organization that strives to create interactive art, “art that sees you,” in public spaces, so there’s never a paywall for the artwork. He places meaning-making and joy, especially that which is created in community or with other people, at the forefront of his practice. He does this not only by making his interactive art pieces customizable to the audience but also by being aware of the site or public setting which allows conversation to be made between audience members because, as he says in the video, you can always create more meaning with others than with oneself. I really admire his ability to do this through complete customizability, like in PDX I Love You where people create heart cutouts of anything (photos, maps, graphics, etc.) they like on Valentine’s day, because it allows an entire range and freedom within that range of meaning-making depending on whatever the audience member wants. His accountability of both accessibility and customizability perfectly accomplishes his goal as it creates genuine meaning-making in the face of certain obstacles, like the consumerism and societal expectations that usually engulf valentine’s day is countered by PDX I Love You’s way of creating meaning. The cool thing is that his work really ranges in the type of interaction as PDX was about sharing and love but he has spherical sculptures about the interaction of movement that’s simply fun for kids to play with and data-collecting visualizations of some kind of input that the audience can execute in real-time. He succeeds in the community effect he attempts to achieve by displaying his work in large public settings or a server that is being updated live so people can see their inputs simultaneously manifest with others. I thoroughly admire his placing of visual execution fully on the audience because it promotes artistic diversity, freedom, community, and spontaneity, which are some of the paramount reasons I am an artist myself. Thus, I see those aspects of presentation as very educational to my practice.

https://whichlight.com/

Ben Fry – Mario Soup/All Streets

This work immediately intrigued me because of its nostalgic draw, but the arrangement and presentation itself make it become a truly standalone artwork. The method of extracting data that Ben Fry uses throughout his work really made me think about how data, in itself, doesn’t really mean anything unless assigned to a certain context or presentation. For example, All Streets is about the concentration and representation of roads in the USA on a map; however, the actual illustration of the data combined with the contextualization of what that data represents geographically, which is in constant engagement with how audiences interact with the map when making sense of it in their intersubjective interpretation of the map (what they call home, what they’ve assumed borders were, what they’ve assumed population/road densities were in certain places).

Thus, in Mario Soup, this method becomes even more meta. The data itself that was specifically made for art is revealed to the audience to be nothing more than pixels of color themselves by the reorganization of that data. Especially interesting is that this was how the data was arranged by the programmers of the game for the utility of the game itself, so utility organization has been flipped on its head as an aesthetic itself when was supposed to be the means of a different aesthetic–that for a game. This was done by decoding the raw data of a Nintendo game cartridge as a four-color image, according to Fry.

https://benfry.com/mariosoup/

Robbie Barrat – AI paintings

Robbie Barrat, a Stanford researcher, has become a cultural phenom in the world of fashion and computer-generated art with AI-generated paintings fetching huge sale prices and his collaborating with renowned fashion brands like Acne Studio and Balenciaga. There’s something utterly jarring the moment your eye hits the “canvas” of a Barrat work; it’s quite other-worldly in the best sense possible–in the most computer sense possible. Just like how the Van Gogh’s and Monet’s of the art world cemented their place in cultural history through the inherent motif inculcated in their “style,” i.e., the stylistic elements that immediately separate their works from others in a purely aesthetic way (e.g., how their brush strokes in a particular way, how those patterns culminate, etc.). Weirdly enough, Barrat clearly puts in the effort in his program to be able to do something similar as it takes two weeks for such paintings to be generated, and when you look at enough of them, you can easily recognize the stylistic elements we could call Barratian. The beautiful drippiness, haziness, euphoric fuzziness, and heavy-like “brush-strokes” make for a hyperreal, thick, layered oil painting with textures that are impossible to create with real paint. His AI is able to do this by analyzing the thousands of painting examples Barrat has fed into its system in order to make these paintings. Those examples along with the AI guidance constitute the probability distributions of the program, but otherwise you can see how random the AI can get with how vastly different the paintings are aesthetically. I feel like Barrat truly made something special here and am very interested in seeing where he ends up in either the computer or art world.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-17/ai-made-incredible-paintings-in-about-two-weeks

Hybrid Forms by Andy Lomas

The artist known for his unique vases and coral-like structures is generally fascinated by how natural forms manifest, grow, and expound from one another. I think this sensibility of his culminates perfectly in Hybrid Forms where he extends on the prior work Cellular Forms in which he creates his graphics, generative art to present the valorization of what seems to be microscopic entities. I like how Lomas goes above and beyond his primary attraction to coral and plant-type structures to, usually, more dynamic ones found in bacteria, viruses, and animals. Cellular + Hybrid forms strive to show these structures and growth through code that generates literal cells that compete with each other, “iterated over tens of thousands of time steps, with final structures having over a hundred million cells and remarkably complex morphologies.” I think the bacteria and virus associations are heavy, but the animal threshold is just broken through with Hybrid Forms as many graphics become similar to jellyfish or water bears in my mind. Nonetheless, static images are amazing, of the structures, but the videos are even better.

https://www.andylomas.com/hybridForms.html

Ralf Baecker’s “Floating Codes” is an immersive and abstract piece of sound and light installation art. It’s made up of many different hexagonal shapes that are constructed by flat metal sticks laid on the ground with sticks of different heights jutting upwards at the vertices of the hexagons. The jutting sticks of lights and speakers on them that flash and make noise through a process that’s a neural network using fundamentals of machine learning and artificial intelligence. “Depending on the topology of the neurons in the grid different networks constitute interlocking circles, feedback loops, memory-like elements, random pattern generators, and other significant behavioral elements.” Thus, completely different manifestations of noises and lights flash according to each other’s behavior to create a chaotic environment for each neuron/perceptron making each other react. “The open and unsupervised system has no objective, its only goal is to maintain and conserve the propagating information in the network.” I love this installation because it utilizes machine learning to create this emulation of propagation and quasi-symbiosis that almost makes it feel like each neuron is part of a greater whole–like a community or colony of organisms. It’s robotic (both the noises and lights) yet lively (in like a cricket way), riding the fine line/liminal space between artificial and natural.

Floating Codes – The (spatial) topology of an artificial neural network

Chrysalis by Matsys (Andrew Kudless)

This piece is a static parametric object after a certain point of algorithmic generation that is supposed to represent a “chrysalis” of sorts made of barnacles. I really like how natural it looks, like a naturally formed coral of sorts, or just marine rock that is completely covered with barnacles. A computational medium actually seems perfect for this type of creature as they are inherently geometric in form yet uniquely distinct from one another.
From the video Kudless provides on his website, you can tell that he wrote an algorithm that has all the shapes of the barnacles set already being attached to each other, so the shapes changing are all relative to each other–they all change together. Thus, the physically fabricated product is a static rendering of a paused moment during this algorithm.
In lieu of what I usually love about algorithmic art is its capability of simulating spontaneity through a controlled form of randomization–a combination of pattern/regularity but with the “naturalness” of how uniquely arbitrary entities in nature are from their own species. So, Kudless’ sensibilities work perfectly with emulating the “generativeness” of how barnacles reproduce and exist and infusing that with the medium of sculpture to create an aesthetic beauty.

https://www.matsys.design/chrysalis-iii