International conference on AI in Work, Innovation, Productivity and Skills

THE AI ART ROOM

Artificial Intelligence acts as a motive for scientific progress as well as a stimulus for creativity. This Art Room presents a small selection of artworks from the AI: More than Human exhibition, specially presented in an online format. These artists use AI as a tool to inspire and a medium to produce their work. AI: More than Human is a major exhibition curated and organised by Barbican International Enterprises and co-produced by Forum Groningen, Netherlands. It explores the evolution of the relationship between humans and technology, showcasing creative and scientific developments in AI and demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives. The exhibition looks to a more fluid, collaborative future and brings together artists, scientists and researchers to offer an unprecedented survey of AI with which visitors are invited to engage head-on.

UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING

Machine Learning, Universal Everything, 2018. Video courtesy of Universal Everything

In Future You, you are faced with a unique reflection of your potential, synthetic self. Starting as a primitive form, the machine learns from your movements to adapt and develop, suggesting an agile, superior version of you. This artwork evolves, creating a new visual response for each visitor. 

 As the robots’ abilities develop from shaky mimicry to composed mastery, a physical dialogue emerges between human and machine — mimicking, balancing, challenging, competing, outmanoeuvring. 

 Machine Learning explores the potential of this human-machine collaboration through performance, showing the result of a dancer teaching a robot how to move.
Machine Learning, 2018 by Universal Everything. Image courtesy of Universal Everything
AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre – 16 May-26 August 2019. Future You, Universal Everything. Credit Tristan Fewings/Getty Images
AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre – 16 May-26 August 2019. Future You, Universal Everything. Credit Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING - BIOGRAPHY

Universal Everything is a global collective of digital artists, designers, animators, musicians and developers. UE’s work explores the future of human expression and collaboration, brought to life using emerging display technologies. The collective invent immersive multi-sensory experiences for pioneering brands, illuminate iconic architecture with video artwork, and direct new forms of moving image that are exhibited at leading cultural institutions worldwide.  

SAM TWIDALE AND MARIJA AVRAMOVIC

Sunshowers 2019.  Real-time animation Commissioned by the Barbican Centre, London

Using the fox wedding scene from Kurosawa’s film Dreams as a starting off point, Sunshowers explores a narrative based on notions of animism and techno-animism. A young boy explores the forest and interacts in his own way with the other intelligent actors that he meets. This real-time animation uses artificially intelligent agents (akin to the non-playable characters of video games) as actors in artificial environments in order to tell it's story. The characters rely on their algorithmically defined emotions and personalities to interact with each other and their environment via a playful distributed neural network which allows them to develop emotionally and to be able to make their own decisions as to how to take the story forward.
Still from Sunshowers, a real-time animation by Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale. Image courtesy of Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale
AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre – 16 May-26 August 2019.
Still from Sunshowers, a real-time animation by Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale. Image courtesy of Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale

Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale - biography

Marija Avramovic and Sam Twidale started working together in 2017. Despite coming from two distinct artistic backgrounds, the main concerns of their work mirror each other. Marija studied painting in Belgrade and then fine arts in Paris. Sam studied music in Liverpool and learned some programming along the way. Together they work at the boundary between the artificial and the real, creating virtual worlds populated by AI characters and spirits, as well as physical installations, all of which inhabit the same playful universe.  

ANNA RIDLER

Mosaic Virus, Anna Ridler, 2018 – 2019. Videowork produced with series of GANs. Technical support from David Pfau. Video courtesy of Anna Ridler

Machine learning uses datasets to teach the computer how to recognise certain features within those datasets. Images are named subjectively by humans and any prejudices will be learned by the machine. Anna Ridler created her own dataset, allowing her to know how each image is labelled. Inspired by the craze for tulips that swept across the Netherlands in the 1630s, she photographed and categorised over 10,000 tulips in order to control the images generated by the neural network. This work has been commissioned by IMPAKT within the framework of EMAP/EMARE/ co-funded by Creative Europe.
AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre – 16 May-26 August 2019. Myriad (Tulips), Anna Ridler. Credit Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Anna Ridler - biography

Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher who works with information and data. Born in London, Ridler spent her childhood raised between Atlanta, Georgia and the United Kingdom. A core element of her work lies in the creation of handmade datasets through a laborious process of selecting and classifying images and text. By creating her own datasets, Ridler is able to uncover and expose underlying themes and concepts while also inverting the usual process of constructing large databases. Her interests are in drawing, machine learning, data collection, storytelling, and technology.

AI: More than Human

AI: More than Human finished its opening run at the Barbican Centre on 26 August 2019. The exhibition transformed the Barbican into an interactive universe for three months and was a huge success, welcoming over 90,000 visitors.

Since then, the exhibition has begun its global tour. It ran at Forum Groningen, Netherlands from December 2019 to August 2020 and it will soon open at World Museum, Liverpool. 

Exhibition curated and organised by Barbican International Enterprises. The City of London Corporation is the owner, founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre. Co-produced by Forum Groningen, Netherlands