“The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

 

The “Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age
of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit

The “The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit, opened last March 5, 2022 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, surveys the extraordinary uses (and abuses including racial bias) inherent in artificial intelligence (AI) in the production of modern and contemporary visual culture around the world. The exhibit runs until October 23, 2022.

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Golden Bee Cube (Synthetic Apiary II, 2020)

The exhibition, following a chronological narrative that first examines the development of artificial intelligence (from the 1950s to the present), through a precise historical lens, was organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) and curated by Bruce Grenville (Senior Curator at the VAG) and Glenn Entis (Guest Curator), a computer animation pioneer, video games industry veteran, and founding faculty member for the Centre for Digital Media.

 

Model of Vancouver House (Bjarke Ingels Group)

A wide-ranging and in-depth exhibition that took three years of planning, it builds on this foundation, emphasizing the explosive growth, over the past decade, of AI technology that is already all around us, from automated investing to self-driving cars as well as across disciplines, including animation, architecture, art, fashion, graphic design, urban design and video games. Revealing the complex nature of this new tool and demonstrating its importance for cultural production, the Imitation Game revolves around the important roles of machine learning and computer vision in AI research and experimentation.

 

Gigapoint System (Patrick Pennefather and
Michal Suchanek) at the Rotunda

It features several AI experiments that excite and fascinate us. Others are creepy, unsettling and frightening as we could have imagined.  In artist Stephanie Dinkins’s Conversations with Bin48 (one of the world’s most advanced robots, complete with moving lips, lifelike skin, and blinking eyes one screen), we watched, on a screen,  the robot explaining to us why there’s nothing “artificial” about artificial intelligence.

 

Humanity (Fall of the Damned)  by Scott Eaton

On another screen, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) tries to mimic digits, over hundreds of epochs, when its learning algorithms finally start to shape foggy blobs into recognizable numbers.  Clips of dystopian sci-fi flicks like Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and World on a Wire also added to our fears. Two major, room-filling installations reveal artificial intelligence’s beautiful, near-poetic possibilities in visual art.

 

*airegan

One installation, devoted to the work of Hong Kong-born, Canadian-raised, New York City-based artist Sougwen Chung, is full of fluid, blue-ink paintings that are collaborations between herself and her machines. At one end is a video projection where we see Chung, from a camera above, creating calligraphic loops and squiggles of ink across a sheet of paper, a massive, white robot arm reacting to her mark-making and adding its own complimentary flourishes to the painting. A collection of Roomba-sized robots on wheels (called “Dougs” by Chung), in the center of the room, whiz around with their brushes trailing paint.

 

Scott Eaton Gallery

The other installation, a massive space devoted to the work of American-born but London-based artist Scott Eaton (whose unique skill set includes a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab, studies in drawing and sculpture in Florence, animation work with Disney and Pixar, and expertise in human anatomy), features around 100,000 carefully photographed nudes fed by Eaton into AI tools (his “Bodies neural network”) that he then directs to “paint” with those fleshy forms, melding and morphing them into photo-real, and often startlingly surreal, new imagery.

 

Metahuman Creator

Other featured artists, designers and architects include *airegan, Stafford Beer, BIG, Ben Bogart, Gui Bonsiepe, Muriel Cooper, DeepDream, Epic Games, Imagenet,  Amber Frid-Jimenez (Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist) with a background in computational design and the creation of computer programs, platforms and applications), Bjarke Ingels Group, Neri Oxman, Patrick Pennefather, Zaha Hadid and WETA, among others.

 

Bina48

“Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” Exhibit: 2/F, Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6Z 2H7, Canada.    Open Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 AM – 5 PM, Tuesdays and Fridays, 12 noon to 8 PM. Admission: $24.00 (adults), $20.00 (seniors), $18 (students), $6.50 (children, 6 – 12 years old) and free (children 5 years old and under).  Tuesdays, from 5 – 9 PM are “donation nights” (pay whatever you want or can afford). Coordinates: 49.282875°N 123.120464°W.