Looking at Contemporary Art Through the Lens of AI

I want to share my experience of appreciating eight artists displaying work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego.

The event was last Friday. Full of bustle & evening attire. A fundraiser.

I’m the weirdo taking videos of details in the art, and feeding it as input to a chain of AI networks hovering in digital working memory 2200 miles away.

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Why do this? Because artists break rules. They violate the statistics of the visual world. This makes the machine interpretation of our

constructed conceptual images … particularly intriguing to me.

1. A detail of a lady’s face, with dripping tear drops. By Allison Saar. The flat shadow makes me feel like she is “filling up” and will drown in her sorrows. The AI systems find the tears, and turn it to 11, which is pouring rain. (The systems I am working with do that, lacking restraint, finding some detail and turning it to 11). I like the way her face gets swallowed into the shadow.

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2. Mani Chacon super imposed a car and a Navajo weaving. Not either or, but both together. The AI finds the car, but misses the native weaving design. Instead of a Navajo motif, it lands closer to Art Deco.

3. John Baldesari wipes out the bowlers identity with bold colors. AI happily hallucinates (some other) identity right back in. Was it right to put a woman on the right? I don’t know.

4. Simryn Gill leaves a boat lurking in a large photographic landscape of chasms. I zoomed right into the blur of the boat, and AI made some waves.

5. Jean Low put a pigs eye in the middle of a plate. Mmm, bacon. The AI stares back at you and takes the nuclear option, swapping the plate’s decorations for electrons in an s orbital.

6. The De La Torre brothers share a sculpture of a rosary with food in it. The AI dreams up a face with the food. I think it’s the Virgin Mary, but her instagram filters aren’t right.

7. Mechi Meko’s work feels like a psychological landscape. I dropped the exposure on my Android camera to see if the AI workflow could work in a darker emotional palette. Kind of? It increased the brightness back up.

8. Anthony Akinbola’s fabric stripes convert into a swaying vertical curtain. The AI misses the loaded details of his work, masking the discomfort Anthony offers.

I know AI can be a hot button topic, ripping off artists, etc. Yes, these tools stand on top of gobs of images scrapped off the internet. Please, do not take this as either a celebration or criticism of the AI tools. This is an exploration … and a celebration of contemporary artists.

If you made it this far, thank you! You probably care about this stuff.

The auction benefits the museum and the artists. Now go support the arts!

Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego

Looking at Contemporary Art Through the Lens of AI

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