Page 91 - The Black Box Book

Figure 1: An artistic depic- SUBVERSION AND A NEW
tion of a Grey Alien. (January 6, 2015).
Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia. VISION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Alieni-
gena.jpg
“Let’s not talk about chance (that’s Cage and the 1960s), we’re mod-
eling a non-human curator from a neural network that was originally
intended to be a 1:1 model of the human mind, ideally an extension
and upgrade of it. I.e., the problem/topic is: To try to create some-
thing that makes decisions based on its own logic, independent of
humans. But what is the actual logic of a machine system created by
man? That’s why we interfere in those processes, actually ‘remove
the human’ from them, let the ‘machine’ be revealed.”
(For Oliver, e-mail, Saturday, September 12, 2020, 12:10 pm)

The curatorial experiment New Archivist (Nový archivář) is a subversive
gesture that addresses the current trends in the use of artificial intelli-
gence in the field of art sciences and visual culture. While it is generally
accepted that artificial intelligence has been used in recent years to
process online databases of cultural heritage as a logical consequence
and the ‘next step’ of large projects aimed at digitizing and making
accessible the collections of memory institutions (such as Google Art
and Culture or Europeana projects), in our project we work with a small
dataset containing about 1000 images. While most projects based on
the automatic classification of large datasets are framed by the endeavour
to create tools for the accurate study of art and cultural history (Digital Cu-
rator, Vasulka Live Archive), our project was devoted to a subjective and
artistic reflection on the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, without
the ambition to generate outputs with the general validity of a sociological
probe. We emphasized the personal testimonies of the artists involved and
experimented with ways of mediating these accounts through different
interfaces and media, with a high degree of added value in the form of
a personal interpretation of the collected digital traces of artistic existence.
By taking this approach, we have been able to shift our attention away
from the utilitarian use of artificial intelligence in the form of automated
processing of big data following predetermined parameters, which also
serve as indicators of the “truthfulness” and “correctness” of the outputs.
Instead, our approach turns toward the intelligent tools themselves and
how they materialise as a new actor in online curation to concentrate on
exploring the logic and potentialities of contemporary artificial intelligence.
Testing neural networks on a relatively small dataset (see the Dataset
chapter) and using a variety of parameters (see the three experiments
described below) allowed us to reach and perhaps transcend the limits
of this technology, unmasking how it works while discovering unexpect-
ed assemblages in its liminal settings and failures, like the outcomes of
the work of the non-human curator – the New Archivist or Alien Curator.

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