Page 381 - The Black Box Book

Subsequently, the image can be sent to the left or to the right, allow-
ing the visitor to decide whether or not they think it is a work of art.
The selected images are then stored in the collection. This is an interactive
game that can be played by two or more players. Evaluating the generat-
ed images based on subjective judgement is a simple task that waits at
the very end of a long chain of automated processes. The viewer becomes
more of an observer of the completed process, whose tastes, demands
and questions influence the output only minimally.
In a recursive process of reflection, the visually impressive outputs
of the AI: All Idiots network have become the subject for the work of
Czech painters. Who is the author of the resulting artwork? And is it
a work of art at all? How different is this software from the hired Chinese
painter-workers redrawing photographs for the Western world? This
analogy was the subject of Aimee Zia Hasan’s artwork, which repro-
duced some of the images generated by artificial intelligence software.
(Figure 19). Another case of recursion is the placement of informa-
tion about participation in the AI: All Idiots exhibition on the website of
the artist whose images are part of the dataset. We observed this, for example,
on the website of the artist Jiří Šigut.
Figure 18: Animation from generated images,
Barbora Trnková, Tomáš Javůrek, view of the installation,
C O N C L U S I O N the MeetFactory Gallery, Prague, 2021.
photo: Katarína Hudačinová
How could art engage in a creative dialogue with a world co-created by
digital technologies and learning algorithms with their own agendas, with-
out falling prey to a mechanical confirmation of stereotypes? The source
of artificial intelligence’s creativity draws from tuning expected and un-
expected patterns and schemas. Like a sensitive photographic material,
the architecture of art’s hidden structures is gradually revealed, intensi-
fying the characteristics of the prejudices and habits we connect with
art. If art is defined as revealing the invisible, then artificial intelligence is
an useful artistic instrument. Ultimately, a tool suitable for removing exist-
ing cultural and aesthetic objects – whereby the Pokémon have flooded
our view with in the past without noticing.

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