AI & NI
AI makes emotions replicable, but this also makes them lose their uniqueness, their "Aura"
Words by Yujing Shenge
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro asks the reader, through the mouth of AF (Artificial Intelligence Friend), "What is the human heart?—the thing that makes each person a unique individual." With the development of technology, the thinking logic of AI is getting closer to human cognition, but the feedback of AI itself to emotions is an a priori imitation, the result of constant training and algorithmic correction. AI makes emotions replicable, but this also makes them lose their uniqueness, their "Aura". How do artists understand, think about and present the fusion of the sensual and the rational when they use AI as a creative medium or as a subject?
AI&NI Artificial Intelligence and Natural Intelligence at 4C Gallery presents works by Ashley Yan, Hanlin Mu, Aussi CHEN, Shiqing Ban, Yufan Xie, Yan Wu, Yu Chen, Juntao Yang, Ting Song, Tracey Shi, Youyang Yu, and The Strange Loop Group artists, who focus on the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence through the media of still images, paintings, sculptures, moving images, and theatre performances. They explore the issue of the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence, and how artificial intelligence can influence and even change human lives in this era of rapid development.
Ashley Yan explores the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence from a surrealist perspective. She uses collage and experimentation to recreate the images, presenting her thoughts on how natural and artificial intelligence should be positioned in the world's order of operation and how people should deal with the alienation of themselves brought about by the development of industrial civilization in a surreal, bizarre yet self-consistent image. The recurring eyes in the images become the artist's imagery of exploration and knowledge, representing her examination and analysis of the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence, and her dialectical thinking on the possible threats and benefits of artificial intelligence in the development of humanity.
With the power of AI, Hanlin Mu recreates a childhood scene from the depths of his memory. Using Midjourney as a creative medium, he recreates a boy's migration journey from the countryside to the city by reconstructing fragments of his childhood memories. The nostalgic tones of the images reveal the unique atmosphere of the era, and the combination of works forms a non-linear poetic narrative; the untamed wildness of AI gives the images a quality that transcends reality, blurring time and space, making one feel like is in a gentle and hazy dream world. Mu invites the audience to join him in this back-to-old-era journey of introspection, retrospection, and memory.
Aussi CHEN's paintings show his thoughts on the digitization of human information. His free lines and playful paintings reflect the innocent and childlike side of his heart and his exploration of the possibilities of interaction between humans and non-humans in a virtual space; he believes that a part of the human spirit will be preserved in a virtual database and will exist forever in this way.
Ban Shiqing frames images of artificially cultivated citrus trees into cavernous windows made of Lego bricks, building a space for reflection with a sense of order. The life of the citrus tree, which is artificially nurtured, raised, picked, and finally abandoned, not only shows the process of domestication of nature by human beings, but also indicates the cruel choice made by natural intelligence in the context of Darwinian socialism; in the process of industrialization, human beings' pursuit of uniformity and tidiness has become more and more extreme, and the survival of the fittest seems to be the only truth. Human beings have forgotten that we are part of this 'imperfect' world.
Inspired by science fiction, Yufan Xie, Yan Wu, and Yu Chen present four sets of future cities through 3D printed sculptures, which are constructed in different ways and can move freely between the underground and the sky. The artists present the viewer with a world in which humans and man-made things are gradually collapsing as the earth is destroyed. They reconstruct the meaning of 'fading' by exploring the connections between man and nature, man and architecture. As Foucault says: "Finitude" is at the essence of the "death of man", although mankind is constantly breaking and rebuilding order, can we finally obtain the truth about death and eternity?
Taking the sacrifices behind the development of artificial intelligence as a starting point, Juntao Yang re-examines the profits and drawbacks that technological advances have brought. In early 2023, OpenAI was revealed to have made AI safer and gentler by hiring Kenyan workers to train AI to recognize extreme speech about violence, hatred, etc.. The intense reading of harmful texts has caused workers to suffer from severe mental illnesses, and the low-cost employment remuneration cannot pay for such consequences. Despite OpenAI company claims that AI can enhance human well-being, behind the development is endless mental exploitation, racial discrimination, and resource depletion. Through his moving image work, Juntao Yang raises questions and reflections on the future of AI - is AI a successful application of human intelligence or a game of power and capital?
The two short films that Ting Song produced with AI showcase her ability to create with the help of AI. In a Peony's Dream, a tragic love story about a human falling in love with an AI, presents the audience with a fantastical vision of dreams overlapping with reality, enabling a journey from future to past; The story of “蜕” is more unconventional and critical, telling the story of a girl who seeks to escape the trauma of the patriarchal system by igniting the fire of art to achieve self-nirvana, thus exploring and advancing in the face of prejudice and oppression. The two video works echo each other, showing the artist's thoughts on how humans and artificial intelligence can co-exist.
Tracey Shi's work explores the lives of undocumented migrants in the context of capitalist surveillance mechanisms. In today's volatile political world, "mobility" has become the only way to escape from wars and political games, but in many cases, migrants are unable to obtain legal residence status, and their personal safety is hardly protected. They are like ghosts, invisible in the context of "foreign lands". As a result, both invisible and explicit political violence pervades their daily lives. The character in the striking jumpsuit in the video is a metaphor for the reality of undocumented migrants who are inevitably attacked by intrusive scrutiny under real-time surveillance, exploring the conflict between the 'visible' and the 'invisible'.
With the aid of AI, Youyang Yu creates an overloaded brain yearning to calm down in the midst of chaotic thoughts through frames of digital watercolor in his animated short film Begin with Pieces. The images present the viewer with a fluent mental space. which with a soundtrack of teenagers singing poetry, all abstract patterns and flickering computer visuals flowing in succession, as if taking one back to the time before thoughts were born or before they took over the human brain. It realizes a tangible representation of the inner experience of self-expression and emotion. The artist also combines creative art with psychotherapy, exploring the role of AI in improving the mental health of youth.
Finally, let’s return to the original philosophical questions themselves, the three questions about "I" that may become the focus of future artists' thinking about the relationship between artificial intelligence and humans, or natural intelligence: "Who am I" - is artificial intelligence a projection or alienation of the human self?; "Where do I come from" - does AI derive its intelligence entirely from natural intelligence? Will it generate autonomous consciousness? "Where am I going" - is the future that AI points to the same as the future that humans expect? Artificial intelligence may make the future that we expect to be possible, or it may take the human world off course. However, this uncertainty is what attracts humanity to this field.
Our Art Panel
The Strange Loop Group explores the nature of the question "Who am I?" through the cyber play "I Am A Strange Loop". This is a question of essence. Through interactive dialogue, three-dimensional spatial shaping, and metaphysical textual narration, the play presents the audience with an autobiography, a reinvention of memory, and an attempt to discover how to reach dizziness. They visualize the question "Who am I?" and try to uncover the hidden truth behind symbols and appearances. However, when humanity cannot solve this problem alone, we throw this question into the void, infinity, and artificial intelligence, will we get the answer we want? Or will it lead to deeper dizziness?
