Painting has simplified over the years, but has always remained firmly in the hands of man. The classical artist was also a technician: he also had to carefully choose the pigments.
Will today's coach also be an artist? Neural networks are the new brushes, data is the new pigments. Only the hand is missing: that will also be non-human.
Refik Anadol knows something about it, and in his latest exhibition at the MoMA he takes this hypothesis to the extreme consequences.
Unsupervised: The new artist is an artificial intelligence
The colossal installation just opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is a 24 by 24 meter square digital display. What does it do? It fills the entire hall of MoMA and transmits an infinite flow of “works”, each of which arises from the interpretation of an artificial intelligence taken from all the works present in the museum.
A flow somehow controlled by what is happening around: the end result is that the installation literally seems alive. It's difficult to describe her, you can only get an idea from this “backstage” clip from a previous exhibition of hers.
Astounding
Not only the titanic dimensions of Unsupervised, but also its contents are compelling: the succession of fantastic images that almost "breathe" arouse a profound emotion.
It's like looking at a portal between different dimensions, and somehow that's what's happening.
We are already moving on from "supervised" artificial intelligences (they were born yesterday: you write and they create an image. Examples? Dall E2 or MidjourneyAI) to “Unsupervised” intelligences, hence the name of the exhibition.
We risk finding one a handle weapons and shoot on his own, but also someone who becomes a famous artist.
How does Unsupervised work?
Over the course of six months, the software created by Anadol and his team (with the collaboration of Nvidia) “trained” on 380.000 very high resolution images taken from over 180.000 works of art preserved in the MoMA galleries.
Everything ended up in the cauldron: from Picasso to Warhol via Boccioni and Salvador Dalì. Even the Pac-Man by Toru Iwatani. The artificial intelligence got "an idea of him" (starting from a model) and started producing new images.
The results?
Surprising for all participants. Curators first and foremost, almost moved to see how 200 years of art history have been "born" in a new way. Is it real art, to the extent that it arouses real emotions? And theartificial intelligence can he be an “artist”?
For now he is like an eccentric workshop student. And the master is a visionary, a "modern magician". Indeed, many masters: those who created the neural network, those who built the training model and the visionary who coordinated them. Refik Anadol's technological expertise was crazy.
What he and his team have accomplished is amazing. The images have unprecedented resolution, are created in real time and change according to the movement of the audience and weather conditions. These inputs drive forces that affect different levers of the software, which in turn change the way Unsupervised creates images.
The artist survives
For the next four months, this artificial artist will continue to create a new universe, and perhaps it will remain after that. Ultimately, Unsupervised is a synthesis of all the art that lives in the museum, the very embodiment of MoMA.
In other words, the art that lives in the museum feeds this artificial artist that lives alongside it, adding something new to the collection every moment. Something so amazing that it could truly open the portal to a new universe.
