GROUP EXHIBITION

While generative AI promises to transform artistic research by offering new tools, it’s also beginning to have a profound impact on the way we view images and works of art. The term “apophenia” refers to the cognitive tendency to perceive meaningful links between disparate and unrelated elements. In its amplified forms it can be compared to the pattern-recognition processes at the heart of generative artificial intelligence. These algorithms, streamlined for efficiency, can output aberrations that defy any sense of coherence in the source data. These unexpected outcomes can also be productive, and are seen here as a fertile starting point for artistic research.

The exhibition sheds light on some of the implications of generative AI as it emerges from the shadows of the ‘black box’. The included artworks still focus primarily on human intelligence and inquiry, and the development of creative processes and conceptual systems, but have become entangled in these technologies—with several of the artists even going so far as to modify the AI systems themselves. Whether reflecting on collective memory as cataloged in national archives, an experimental theatrical production voicing AI-proposed grand narratives, a future projection of artworks not yet produced by an artist (imagined beyond their knowledge and consent), the veil of a dream filtered through AI as a way to recount a harrowing experience, a conversation with an inhuman system about something inhumane, or a transformation of landscape in the form of a new eruption, the works of art in the exhibition are invested with a vivid curiosity, putting to the test the ways in which these new technologies promise to radically change, and yes interrupt, our world.