Antoine Picon, "Beyond Digital Avant-Gardes: The Materiality of Architecture and its Impact", in Architectural Design, vol. 90, n° 5, 2020, pp. 118-125. (original) (raw)
2019
Intelligence Everywhere: What artistic explorations can tell us through and about technological development presented on Sept 18 2019 during the Humanities and Public Life Conference at Dawson College, Montréal, Canada Recent developments in machine learning and what John McCarthy has named artificial intelligence in 1956 have repeatedly been portrayed in the media as competing with human creativity. Binary narratives that (narcissistically) anthropomorphize and present technological advancements as either miraculous or antagonistic spread fear and fascination amongst the public. Machines, some threaten, will take your job as an artist, a lawyer, a taxi driver, a doctor, an accountant, and govern us … In this presentation I wish to draw a historical lineage between ideas that were at the roots of the British branch of cybernetics comparing and contrasting the worldview that underlined it with the approach taken by the founders of the Artificial Intelligence project in 1956. I wish to establish the link between the cybernetic worldview and the recent developments in machine learning that we commonly refer to as Artificial Intelligence. (AI) These powerful discoveries are currently used to generate images, natural language, soundscapes and videos that can be mistaken to have been produced by people. This has pushed some to declare that the machines were themselves creative. I will argue that while the tools do display what N.Katherine Hayles calls non-conscious cognition, a process that is found everywhere in nature, creativity, in the realm of art, is a concept rooted in the self-reflexive sense-making ability of the person orchestrating it as well as in the social, cultural and political context in which it is being examined. Presenting creativity from the point of view of the art world, I will argue that the definition of art does not lie solely in the formal aesthetics of the object produced but is a shifting culturally constructed concept that is by no means negated by machine “imagination” or “creativity”. The notion of authorship in relation with automation in the creative process have been explored thoroughly in the realm of art ever since, for example, Marcel Duchamp presented his readymade, Walter Benjamin published his famous text in 1937 and Roland Barth examined aspects of the topic in 1967. Early cybernetic prototypes that displayed cognitive behaviours as well as artworks that use automation in their creative process will be presented as well as a selection of recent art practises that explore and comment on the use of statistical models or what Hunger calls “enhanced pattern recognition” systems such as artificial neural networks and adversarial neural networks. (Hunger 2017) These artworks often present advanced technical tools as one component of a network (Latour) /agencement (Deleuze) in which humans interact with them in complex and intricate ways. Through the examination of a selection of projects by artists from various backgrounds, such as the recent work and writings by indigenous artists as well as local and international artists, I wish to point to some of the shortcomings they bring to light as well as how they engage us into some much-needed reflection about the technologies we generate and how they hold the potential to redefine us and the environment.