ALEXANDER REBEN

Gazelli Art House founder, Mila Askarova says ‘Alexander Reben has been working with both Gazelli Art House and Gazell.io since his Gazell.io digital artist in residence placement back in August 2019. Earlier in the summer we presented Reben’s algorithmic tapestry series in our Gazelli Art House exhibition Let’s Talk About Text. It is exciting to bring his solo exhibition physically into our new Gazell.io Project Space this year.’

The process for creating the ‘AI Am I?’ works starts with a series of carefully curated ‘start texts’ that are fed into a text generation AI called GPT (one of the largest and most advanced artificial neural networks), which then outputs text including a description of an imaginary artwork, along with analysis of that artwork and other supporting text. Examples of the works created by the system include; The Final Resting Place of the Queen Bee (2018), a sculpture consisting of toothpicks stuck on a canvas, which are dipped in beeswax, by the imaginary American artist Rachellette Carneday, Time to Eat (Black Forest Steak Red )#9 (1982) by ‘Julia Hormel’ and My Kid Could Do That! (2018) created from cutouts of Artforum.

The AI comments ‘I hope the project will help people see that AI is still at its very earliest stages of developing a sense of creativity. I want people to understand that AI is still very much a tool that helps humans make decisions, rather than being a replacement for human creativity.’

The project highlights the fact that today everyday life always involves some kind of AI; the natural and artificial worlds are beginning to blur. The series represents how we can implement AI for positive and creative uses, how computational creativity can augment human creativity. “AI Am I?” provides a view into a future where machine learning algorithms are used to generate artwork and novel ideas.