First canon of algorithmic art

The Turk, the 18th-century automaton that won chess games across Europe thanks to a short master hidden inside, is always mentioned in the archaeological mythology of artificial intelligence. The invention gave its name to Amazon Mechanical Turk, which offers precarious labor services between digital companies—generally in the North—and workers—often in the Global South.

In her installation "Mechanical Kurds ," German artist Hito Steyerl offers an ironic and unexpected twist to this technological myth. In a video, she shows how several people in a Kurdish refugee camp work for European and North American companies, labeling images and training neural networks. The poverty of the dusty architecture where they live contrasts with the multicolored exuberance of the virtual landscapes of their impossible work environment.

The works shake up indifference regarding the ethical, political, social and material consequences

This is one of the many works in the exhibition The World According to AI —curated by Italian professor Antonio Somaini and a large team for the Jeu de Paume imaging center in Paris (until September 21)—that shake up the indifference regarding the ethical, political, social, and material consequences of the expansion of new artificial systems over the last ten years. Because there is no place here for the spectacular aesthetics generated by prompts and supercomputers: all the selected projects share a critical affinity. And they are accompanied by pieces from the history of technology, science, and generative art and writing that allow us to contextualize the novelty.

In the video installation Ekphrasis, for example, Estampa connects fragments of films by Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, and Chantal Akerman with the algorithmic gaze, which attempts to analyze and classify what the machine is seeing on the screen divided into nine rectangles. The descriptions illuminated by the computer are new forms of the ancient ekphrasis. They are not only verbal but also numerical. It attempts to calculate the percentage of genders. It doubts whether it is an actor or an actress; or whether the film is experimental or realist.

The objective was that: to dissect the ups and downs, the margins, the errors. Roc Albalat, part of this Barcelona collective, emphasizes that "the process has been a learning process, including conversations with the curatorial team and the other artists." The connection with the curator's narrative "led us to put these new tools in dialogue with cinematic images, and to explore the effects of automation on visual culture." The result is hypnotic and disconcerting.

The inclusion in the exhibition of two works by Estampa (the other being Repetition Penalty, eight LED screens with text repeated ad nauseum) and the eHerbarium project by Joan Fontcuberta, which reworks the old link between photography and botany through the creation of ghostly, perfect flowers with the help of Stable Diffusion, Lexica and Leonardo AI, means that both Catalan creators are part of the new canon of algorithmic art.

Read also The algorithmic canon Jorge Carrión

Because The World According to AI has a canonical vocation. In addition to the usual suspects, such as Trevor Paglen, Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler, or Holly Herndorn and Matt Dryhurst, the exhibition adds French creators (Julien Prévieux, Justine Emard) and emerging figures from other countries, such as Nouf Aljowaysir (Saudi Arabia), Egor Kraft (Russia), and Linda Dounia Rebeiz (Senegal). It also broadens the focus of contemporary art to other creative languages. Filmmaker Érik Bullot, a specialist in the history of lost or unfinished films, transforms the notes of the symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux into prompts for creating a kind of photo novel. And the final section is dedicated to synthetic writing.

As Somaini says in his catalogue text—a book that will be a reference in the field of artificial humanities—“A theory of images and visual culture today requires a theory of latent spaces.” That is, “of the crucial role played by abstract constructions, materials whose cultural and political implications can hardly be overestimated.” Since access to these mind-bogglingly complex computer spaces is impossible, we need art as an interface, as translation, as critique, and as metaphor.

Next year, the first museum exclusively exhibiting AI-powered art will open in downtown Los Angeles. It's called Dataland. It's the brainchild of Refik Anadol, the most famous and sought-after artist working with these tools. He's mentioned in the catalog, as his importance is undeniable, but he hasn't been included in Paris. Coincidentally, he's of Turkish origin.