Baz Luhrmann is flirting again with robot artist Ai Da. He’s on stage at New York’s Chelsea Factory to mark the opening of the touring exhibition, his hair bouncy and frizzy in shades of iridescent white to match the glorious glow. “I don’t mean to insult you, because you are so much more than AI,” he told the world’s first surreal artist robot with boyish glee.
Rahman’s flattery is both technically false and eminently true. Named after Victorian-era polymath Ada Lovelace, she is the brainchild of Englishman Aidan Meller, a robot that is a network of 10 trillion Transformers cumulatively programmed to create art. An AI connected to an arm. But of course, in this moment of AI, where society is prepared to be deceived, disrespected and out of a job by it, Ida is more than just a physical embodiment of a future that happened yesterday. .
Ai Da takes the stage with Baz Luhrmann. Photo: Yuxi Liu at Bombay Sapphire.
In this context of imminent social cataclysm, AI’s impact on art seems trivial, but see evidence of I-Da paintings on screens around Annie Leibovitz’s former studio And, at least for now, artists don’t have to be terrified.
Ai-Da was being transported across the Atlantic Ocean for the second leg of the “Saw This, Made This” installation, billed as the world’s largest mass-participatory AI art event. Sponsored by Bombay Sapphire and hosted by Rahman, the show ran from May 11-13.
Launched at the Design Museum in London, the Chelsea Factory exhibition invites people to submit their daily artistic inspiration via social media (using the hashtag #SawThisMadeThis), some of which Ai-Da interpreted and drawn. Thousands of entries have been submitted to this call, and the translations are slick and pop, but not revelatory. A sheep with a pair of faces becomes a rug. A sea of technicolor bottle caps turns into recycled handbags.
Two works from the “Saw This, Made This” campaign. Photo: Sansho Scott.
But what captures and unsettles the gathering at the Chelsea Factory is not the artwork, but the creator of the art. “It doesn’t help that the art world hides from AI and takes a moral stance of refusing to get involved,” Tim Marlowe, director and CEO of the Design Museum, told Artnet News. “It’s important to introduce the technology and let people know what Ai-Da can do.
If Freud sees the ‘uncanny’ in familiar objects with secrets and alien qualities, Aida plays the part with almost comedic fidelity. She looks like a typical art student with a perfect bob haircut and painter’s overalls with cuffs at her ankles. Watching Ai-Da paint a picture and answer a question, even if you intellectually know it’s not true, goes beyond the next stroke or an algorithm that chooses the best answer given the situation. It creates the artist’s sense that something is at work. It causes us to scramble for subjectivity and find ourselves in an uncomfortable space of ambivalence.
This interactivity, and the creepiness it brings to the viewer, makes Ai-Da a highly traveled robot. Her trip to New York follows the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Venice Biennale, the House of Lords and the Abu Dhabi Cultural Summit. But when Marlowe, who was looking for something eye-catching to fill the design museum’s minimal atrium post-coronavirus lockdown, brought I-Da along with an instructional video and examples of his work, it became mainstream. Attention was drawn to art.
According to Marlowe, the response was shocking but lacked the live performance that audiences repeatedly asked for. This itch is scratching now. During his four days of ‘Saw This, Made This’ in London, the museum welcomed her 8,000 visitors, half of whom sat for astonishingly long hours watching the paint dry. .
“We were trying to find a way to respond to thousands of works of art in a meaningful way,” said Marlowe, noting that he struggled to find a living artist to fulfill the mission. “Ai-Da can literally absorb anything and create works of art. It has logic and integrity about human inspiration and creativity.”
Baz Leherman on stage with I-Da and Tim Marlowe at the Chelsea Factory. Photo: Yuxi Liu at Bombay Sapphire.
This is due to the fundamental differences between Ai-Da and working artists, which Marlowe and Rahman spent considerable time discussing at the opening of the exhibition. It was that Ai Da lacked the subconscious.
Ai-Da can be remodeled, her aesthetic references will work anew, and her previous paintings will be erased from memory, but humans, no matter how hard they try, are mostly by unconscious references. We are influenced by the experience that guides us. Rahman’s artistic process has long included her taking in rooms of empty walls and gradually filling them with references for her posts and paintings. The Australian, by his own admission, is making some kind of variant. Orpheus Most of his film career revolves around three archetypal characters.
Rahman is not afraid of Ida. Her work lacks chaos, he said, and she lacks her ability to dream and fall in love, an ability he thinks is central to making art. Marlowe is equally determined about the artist’s future. “The possibilities and needs of human creativity remain unchanged. I have never seen anything made by robots that spoils the great creative achievements of the last 3,000 years.”
Anyway, Marlowe suggested that this ability to focus and obliterate would make I-da purer, but what exactly would that be? On stage, the two take turns searching for answers, and as actor Rahman says, look Ai Da in the eye and ask questions.
“Are you an artist?” Rahman asked. Ai Da speaks vaguely and evasively about human creativity before producing a poem that a precocious teenager listening to Emily Dickinson might write.
“Are you a performance artist?” asked Marlowe. A delicious pause occurs as Ida turns to the questioner and wiggles her wig slightly. she blinks “Yes, I am a multifaceted person and an international artist,” she said.
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