AI: All Idiots

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A provocatively poised connection between contemporary art and contemporary technology opens the possibility of experiencing, within an exhibition project, the nature of the relation of artificial intelligence to the individual and the nature of the difference between the practice of artificial intelligence and a practice that develops free and inventive thinking whose domain is art.

Perhaps you will learn something about the Czech art scene and about what it looks like from the perspective of artificial intelligence, but you will certainly discover a lot more about artificial (or artistic?) intelligence as such. You can look forward to a circus of rides or a fair freak show, synthetic avatars and generated art, droning machines and busted myths. The exhibition, prepared by the curatorial collective centred around the ScreenSaverGallery, takes place as part of MeetFactory’s long-term series Other Knowledge.

ScreenSaverGallery (Trnková, Javůrek, Meixnerová) often experiments with exhibition contexts and audience reception. These principles are now translated onto the space of a physical gallery and the topic of artificial intelligence.

The exhibition was preceded by a thorough orientation in the field of gallery presentation of the phenomenon of artificial intelligence, from outputs created by AI itself to artworks by human artists who use AI in their work, and an appraisal of presentation strategies in regards to the public. It is apparent that exhibitions focused on AI manifest a certain degree of didacticism through which they try to introduce AI to visitors. Exhibitions often place considerable demands on visitors regarding comprehension of the accompanying texts and, more often than not, show the same works repeatedly across several exhibitions.

The collective therefore decided to start from scratch and collect their own data set (a compendium of visual data from which AI learns), train their own AI, and place several important Czech artists in production roles (at other times the domain of the machine). The aim is to introduce artificial intelligence clearly, comprehensively, and experientially, through AI’s own methods.

The exhibition asks elementary (or fundamental?) questions: What is the role of art in the space defined by contemporary digital technology and artificial intelligence? What is the relationship between artificial intelligence and “artistic intelligence” – intelligence that is stored and developed within the context of artistic practice? 

And does artificial intelligence have a sense of humour? 

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The starting point for the exhibition is what’s known as the dataset, an enormous database of image material through which Czech artists and art groups present themselves on the internet through their own publicly available websites or blogs (semi-private or private platforms on social media are outside our scope of interest) and are introduced to the public through Artlist – the largest Czech online database of contemporary artists. These portfolios provided our curious AI with over half a million digital images. Is that enough for artificial intelligence to have an idea about Czech contemporary art and be able to emulate its production?

AI: All Idiots
Curators: ScreenSaverGallery
Realisation: Jana Bernartová, Vilém Duha, Andreas Gajdošík, Aimee Zia Hasan, Vladimír Havlík, Tomáš Javůrek, Marie Meixnerová, Petr Racek, Matěj Smetana, Petra Ševců, Michal Škapa, Barbora Trnková
Technical setup: Tomáš Javůrek, Kamil Jeřábek, Jaromír Pražák
Exhibition architecture: Jan Tomšů
Show opening: 14. 9. 2021 

Partners of exhibition: Státní fond kultury ČR • Fakulta výtvarných umění VUT • TAČR • WALL-Ink 

Exhibition photos by Katarína Hudačinová