Page 357 - The Black Box Book

tally clean up part of an artwork. The categorization of art is a delicate, R EP R E S EN T A T I V E
time-varying dialogue that runs parallel to its creation, involving artists,
theorists, curators, gallerists, critics, historians, and viewers, all of whom Through extractive, selective, and sorting processes, algorithms reduce
could hardly agree not only on classification but also on categories. and trivialize the complexity of the original situations. Reduction and sub-
The simple, accelerated labelling that would be required to prepare a bal- traction belong to the palette of techniques used for artistic expression,
anced dataset is, in our view, beyond (not only) art. for example in sculpture. In our project, we thematized reduction through
Matěj Smetana is an artist known for experimenting with the pos- its hyperbolization: a single representative of the entire dataset was dis-
sibilities of animation and the idea of an algorithmically moderated data- played in the gallery installation of the exhibition (Figure 8).
set intrigued him. By automating the ordering of images in the dataset
according to a certain key, four films were created with a specific narra- “One image has been randomly chosen from the collected data-
tive based on the conflict of original and emergent contexts (Figure 7). set - a digital reproduction of a painting, which was later loaned
for the exhibition to stand as a representative of the whole da-
“Artificial intelligences excel in recognizing patterns and extraordi- tabase collection. A thumbnail image selected by the algorithm.”
nary mechanical memory… They are geniuses and idiots at the same Aimee’s monologue – digital guide to the exhibition AI: All Idiots
time; idiot-savants. The dataset can be sorted in various ways. Half
a million images can be arranged according to their similarity, col- S TAT I S T I C D A TA
our, composition of image elements; their size, symmetry, shapes
and so on… Sorting is the basics of Artificial Intelligence. Thanks to “The chart on the wall is based on the original complete dataset
sorting, AI can learn various things. We humans perceive the rapidly of the Czech art scene created for the AI: All Idiots project. Who
changing images – in some way similar – to a movement; simple are the heroes? Who are the outsiders? Who is the best Czech art-
animation; This effect is caused by the persistence of vision and ist? Only when you understand the data can you start the teach-
the processes in the human brain. By simple sequencing of images ing process. The dataset serves as a source material for artificial
connections are created perceivable only by human beings, that intelligence I have trained, as well as for invited mediators from
are hidden to artificial intelligence. This is another big difference the ranks of artists: Andreas Gajdošík, Vilém Duha, Matěj Smetana,
between how the dataset is perceived by oneself and by artificial Jana Bernartová, Barbora Trnková, Tomáš Javůrek.
intelligence. Sequencing 136 458 images according to one clue has In Meet Factory, they present artistic outputs based both on
taken the artificial intelligence approximately fourteen days. There the dataset and on the outputs of the artificial intelligence that is
are four sequences in the installation: created by visual similari- also processing this dataset. The crude language of numbers and
ty, color, composition and surface and lines. Matěj Smetana has comparisons, rough cuts into the soft matter.” Aimee’s monologue
placed the simple animations on top of four robot vacuums, and – digital guide to the exhibition AI: All Idiots
let them cruise the Meet Factory. The vacuum cleaners represent
the seemingly utilitarian development of artificial intelligence devel- We have downloaded 800 names of artists from Artlist.cz. Almost
opment and of technology in general. When installed in the gallery, half of them did not have their own websites. 476 artists had websites,
the vacuums steal away the job of cleaning workers, as artificial but only 456 were active. 20 had a website, but it was not possible to
intelligence is expected to do in a number of professions. But these download images from them. Only 398 addresses could be used to fill
robots are just relatively stupid automatons. This is not the first time up our database. We used a bot programmed on the Nightmare library
robot vacuums have been used in a gallery installation. In relation to automatically aggregate image data from websites.
to this topic it can even be considered an ironic installation cliché.” In order to show how the artificial intelligence software analysis
Aimee’s monologue – digital guide to the exhibition AI: All Idiots performed on the datasets, we distinguished female artists from male
artists. The simplest way to use the algorithm to separate these two
groups was to use the Czech spelling rule in our case, since the dataset
primarily contains Czech names, and identify the women in the dataset by
the surname hyphenation flag of the ending -ová. The statistical deviation,
i.e., the number of female artists who do not hyphenate their surnames,
appeared negligible in terms of pragmatic data. There were 565 male art-
ists in the dataset, but 192 female artists, or only one third (Figure 10).
Furthermore, the data show that women have proportionally more active
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